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S. Wales Coast, S.E. Section 








THE SOUTH WALES COAST 



The South f^ales 
Coast 

From Chepstow to ^Aberystwyth 

By Srnest T{hys 



Illustrated 



Ne w York 

Frederick A, Stokes Company 

Publishers 

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ihts reserved. 



PREAMBLE 

The long range of coast here described, from the 
Wye half-way across Cardigan Bay, bordering 
the land of a hundred castles, offers one of the 
best holiday regions in all Britain. But the 
country has far too much individuality to be 
treated only in the light of another summer and 
autumn resort — a wilder extent that is being 
tamed to the lure of the golfer and the motorist. 
So the following pages have been made trans- 
parent wherever the chance came to the real 
lineaments and Welsh differences of each par- 
ticular bit of country, and nothing has been held 
too trivial that serves to start its memory or 
spirit of place. For the itinerant, recounting his 
steps, often finds it was a sand-filled railway arch, 
a tramp or cockle-picker, a broken wall or old 
salt-house, quite as much as any castle of romance 
or lion of the guide-books, that knitted up the 
associations of a scene, and gave it the salient 
touch. 

On a last journey to Caerleon, where I was 
bound thinking mainly of the Roman city of 
Legions and Arthur's " Round Table," the decisive 
incident proved to be the overtaking on the road 
of an unlucky house-carpenter who had been 
"fired" from Newport workhouse that morning, 
and who drove King Arthur clean out of the 



6 PREAMBLE 

picture. On the Welsh roads the realities are 
for ever overtaking romance in this way, and 
you have, if you are a sentimental traveller, to 
be forewarned of them, and to be prepared for 
the cloud of smoke that hangs in the mining 
valleys, and for slums on a mountain-side where 
you expected a castle. Even the great change 
which is now passing over Gwent and Glamorgan, 
and which has needlessly ruined by sheer neglect 
(not of art but of science) the look and finer 
human ordering of whole regions, has led to the 
magnificence of the Titanic docks and their ocean- 
ships, and the beginning of great Welsh seaport 
and city architecture. You need not care only 
for the past, or be an archseologue or romancer, 
to enjoy this land of Merlin and the Tylwyth 
Teg, and once you have come under its "cyfaredd," 
as the poets say, you will get to like it better and 
better every year you return to it. 

Before he turns the leaf the writer ought to 
acknowledge very gratefully the unselfish aid he 
has had from various people, including his fellow- 
travellers. In especial his thanks are due to 
Mr. T. H. Thomas — artist, naturalist, and Welsh 
" Herald " — for the loan of invaluable original 
drawings for reproduction, and for the account 
of the Isle of Birds, Grassholm (the " G wales 
in Penvro " of the Mabinogion, never, I believe, 
before described). Also to "G. R." for her con- 
tributions to the chapters on Kenfig, Margam, 
and St. Davids ; to Mr. John Ballinger of the 
National Library of Wales, Mr. Walter Spurrell, 
and Professor J. M. Lewis for the loan of 
photographs ; while I owe to my uncle, Mr. 
Percy Percival of Berrow Manor, the account in 
the Milford chapter of the birds on Skomar 



PREAMBLE 7 

Island. To name in full all the writers, live and 
dead, whose works have been quoted, from Gerald 
the Welshman to Sir John Rhys, would require 
another page : but I must not forget the claims 
of Archceologia Cambrensis, the bible and the 
encyclopaedia of the Welsh antiquary, without 
which the labours of most of us would be vain. 
The ensuing chapters, it is well to add, are based 
upon a very long acquaintance with the country, 
and upon almost as many journeys as they 
number ; and in the sentimental retrospect the 
old landmarks and the new may at times seem 
confused, or an English mile be turned into a 
Welsh one. But the book is not a gazetteer, and 
it purposely omits much that can be had in every 
guide-book. The best check upon its record in 
the matter of distances, coast-roads and the like, 
is a good chart ; and overleaf will be found a list 
of maps in the Ordnance Survey covering the five 
Welsh shires whose sea-board figures in its pages. 



LIST OF SMALL-SCALE ORDNANCE 
SURVEY MAPS 

One mile to one inch, published in outline or 
coloured (flat or folded) : Nos. 163, 177, 178, 192, 
193, 194, 209, 210, 227, 228, 229, 244, 245, 246, 247, 
248, 249, 250, 261, 262, 263. Prices Is., Is. 6d., and 2s. 

A series of maps on the same scale, but covering 
larger areas: Nos, 69, 78, 89, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 
110, 111. Coloured edition only (flat or folded). 
Prices Is. 6d., 2s., and 2s. 6d. Some are published 
and some are in course of preparation. 

Two miles to one inch : Nos. 15, 20, 21, 26, 27, 32. 
Coloured edition (flat or folded). Prices Is. 6d., 
2s., and 2s. 6d. Also published on the Layer 
System by which different altitudes are more 
clearly indicated by flat colouring of various 
shades. 

Four miles to one inch : Nos. 13, 14, 18. Coloured 
edition (flat or folded). Prices Is. 6d., 2s., and 2s. 6d. 
Also published in uncoloured flat sheets. Price Is. 6d. 

Four miles to one inch : County Maps. Cardi- 
ganshire, Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Gla- 
morganshire, Monmouthshire (flat or folded). Price 
Is. each. 

Ten miles to one inch : No. 9. Coloured (flat or 
folded). Prices Is., Is. 6d., and 2s. Uncoloured 
(flat sheets only). Price Is. 

Mr. T. Fisher Unwin, Adelphi Terrace, London, 
W.C., is the sole wholesale agent for all the above- 
mentioned maps, which can be obtained through 
any bookseller. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. CHEPSTOW AND THE WYE . . .13 

II. THE " OLD SEVERN CROSSING," PORTSKEWETT 

AND WENTWOOD .... 24 

III. NEWPORT . . . . . .33 

IV. OAERLEON-ON-USK . . 45 

V. FROM THE USE TO THE TAFF . . .54 

VI. OLD AND NEW CARDIFF ... 63 

VII. THE VALE OF GLAMORGAN . . .73 
VIII. PENARTH, SULLY AND THE HOLMS . . 82 

IX. BARRY ISLAND TO ABERTHAW . . .89 

X. LLANTWIT MAJOR TO ST. DONAT's . . 100 

XI. DUNRAVEN TO CANDLESTON . . . 115 

XII. NEWTON NOTTAGE TO KENFIG . . 126 

XIII. MARGAM ...... 140 

XIV. NEATH AND THE VALE OF NEATH . . 147 

XV. SWANSEA ...... 161 

XVI. LUNDY ISLAND .... 175 

XVII. THE EAST GOWER COAST . . . 183 

XVIII. THE WEST AND NORTH GOWER COAST . 192 
XIX. BURRY INLET AND CARMARTHEN BAY . . 206 

g 



10 CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

XX. LLANELLT TO KIDWELLY . . . 214 

XXI. LLANSTEPHAN AND FEEBYSIDE . . 219 

XXII. CABMAETHEN ..... 228 

XXIII. EHYD-Y-GOES, LAUGHAENE AND PENDINE . 241 

XXIV. TENBY ...... 250 

XXV. MANOBBIEE, GEEALD THE WELSHMAN'S 

COUNTEY ..... 267 

XXVI. PEMBEOKE CASTLE .... 276 

XXVII. THE BOSHEESTON EOAD : ST. GOVAN'S TO THE 

STACK EOCKS .... 287 

XXVIII. MILFOED AND THE HAVEN . . . 297 

XXIX. SOLVA AND ST. DAVID'S . . . 302 

XXX. EAMSEY AND GEASSHOLM . . . 316 

XXXI. THE NOETH PEMBEOKE COAST I FISHGUAED, 

NEWPOET, ETC. .... 329 

XXXII. CAEDIGAN ..... 342 

XXXIII. THE CAEDIGAN COAST . . . 350 

XXXIV. ABEEYSTWYTH ..... 363 
XXXV. LLANBADABN TO BORTH . . . 373 

INDEX ...... 383 



iZ 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

old salt house : poet eynon . . Frontispiece 

From a Water Colour by Mr. T. H. Thomas 

FACING PAGE 

TOWN GATE, CHEPSTOW .... 16 

Drawing by Mr. T. H. Thomas 
TINTEEN ABBEY . . . . . .22 

Photo by Williams & Curnuck, Newport, Mon. 
CALDECOT CASTLE ..... 29 

Photo by Williams <k Curnuck 
NEWPORT CASTLE (LOW TIDE) . . . .34 

Photo by Williams d- Curnuck 

ST. WOOLOS'S CHURCH . . . .44 

Photo by Williams & Curnuck 

AT CARDIFF DOCKS . . . . .68 

Photo by Williams & Curnuck 

"AN UNCONSCIOUS FOLK-LORIST " \ VALE OF GLAMORGAN 80 
From a Drawing by Mr. T. H. Thomas 

LLANTWIT MAJOR '. THE COLUMBARIUM . . 105 

From a Drawing by Mr. T. H. Thomas 

ST. donat's castle ..... 112 

Drawing by Gastineau 
NEATH : THE OLD CHURCH . . . 1 49 

Photo by Williams & Curnuck 
OLD SWANSEA \ THE CASTLE AND HARBOUR . . 163 

From a Drawing by W. Turner 
THE MUMBLES HEAD ..... 183 

Photo by Williams & Curnuck 
OYSTERMOUTH CASTLE ..... 188 

Photo by Williams & Curnuck 
THE MALEVOLENT DRAGON IN PENNARD CHURCH . 191 

From a Sketch by E. B. 

OLD OYSTERSHELL LAMP I GOWER COAST . . 205 

11 



. 232 



12 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

CAEROENNIN CASTLE, CARMARTHENSHIRE . . 210 

Drawing by Gastineau 
LLANSTEPHAN CASTLE I FROM THE SANDS 224 

Drawing by Gastineau 
OLD CARMARTHEN .... 

Print by Buck (1740) 
LAUGHARNE CASTLE ..... 248 

Drawing by Gastineau 
SKOMAR ISLAND ...... 298 

From a Drawing by Mr. T. H. Thomas 

SOLVA 302' 

Photo by Mr. Walter Spurrell, JJP., Carmarthen 
PORTH CLEIS ...... 308 

Photo by Mr. Walter Spurrell, J.P. 
OFF RAMSEY ISLAND ..... 318 

From a Drawing by Mr. T. H. Thomas 
SEABIRDS AT GRASSHOLM ISLAND . . . 325 

From a Drawing by Mr. T. H. Thomas 

PENTRE IVAN CROMLECH .... 331 

Photo by Prof. J. Morgan Lewis 
THE CASTLE, NEWPORT, PEMBROKESHIRE . . 335 

Photo by Prof. J. Morgan Lewis 

LLECH-Y-DRYBEDD CROMLECH . . . 335 

Photo by Prof. J. Morgan Lewis 
CORACLES ON THE TEIVY .... 345 

Photo by Prof. J. Morgan Lewis 
CARDIGAN BRIDGE ..... 345 

From an old Painting 

DANIEL ROWLANDS, LLANGEITHO . . . 352 

Photo by W. B. Hall, Aberystwyth 

SAND DUNES ON THE COAST .... 355 

Photo by W. B. Hall 
MONK'S CAVE, CARDIGAN COAST . 

Photo by W. B. Hall 
A STORM AT ABERYSTWITH : THE ESPLANADE . 364 

Photo by W. B. Hall 
THE DEVIL'S BRIDGE RAILWAY . . , 374 

Photo by W. B. Hall 

OLD SALTS AT BORTH .... 378 

Photo by W. B. Hall 
CANTREV-Y-GWAELOD I A DROWNED FOREST . . 379 

Photo by W. B. Hall 



The South Wales Coast 

CHAPTER I 

CHEPSTOW AND THE WYE 

It was market-day when we got to Chepstow, and 
droves of sheep and cattle from the country were 
being driven through the town to the market-pens 
by the railway station. Under the flanking arch 
of the " Beaufort Arms " a lively Welsh ram made 
a charge at us ending in a leap, shoulder high ; 
and for the first time in my experience Chepstow 
streets appeared wide awake. For within that 
arch Beaufort Square and the town about it have 
as a rule the appearance of living upon the recol- 
lection of past market-days, an ancient siege or 
so of the Castle, and the memory of Henry Marten 
the Regicide. 

But once you relate the town to the countryside 
and the old forest tracts for whose timber it once 
served as river-port, all becomes changed. Then 
the west-country air blows down the Wye valley 
loaded with the true Monmouthshire spice, and 
mixes persuasively with the salt breath of the 
tide under the Castle and the bridge. The Castle, 
cold at first to the traveller's mind, as castles are 
apt to be, begins to rekindle in the picture. It 
assumes again the name it bore in Domesday 
Book : " Castellum de Estrighoeil " — a name 

is 



14 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

puzzling at first, which, as you think it over, 
seems fairly to bristle with military threats, 
and far more than the Saxon Chepstowe (Cheap 
Stowe) holds the clue to the original site. Pos- 
sibly it was Roman to begin with ? Strata Julia, 
the Welsh of which is Ystrad Iwl — Ystrigoil ? 
Possibly there was another British name before 
the Roman ? But it is clear at any rate that under 
the title of Chepstow you have a British camp and 
a Roman station, a Norman castle and an English 
town in a Welsh country which gradually grew 
under cover of the Castle, and was approached by 
what had been a Roman road, the old Vicinal Way. 
You lost the old sense of the town and its 
approaches in coming here by train, instead of 
walking or riding the road from Gloucester — the 
turnpike still called by the people the Street. 
Tramping that stretch of road, you would expe- 
rience what it is in an old country highway, and 
for choice one going west and following a Roman 
lead, that gets hold of mortal man, and tells him 
he is walking with the dust of the feet of fifty 
generations and more on his boots. However, 
even as you hurry by rail down the Severn with 
the river appearing and disappearing on your left 
and the Street some two or three farms away on 
your right, you may recover something of the 
mediaeval traveller's mood, and carry from Lydney 
mixed ideas of an old weather-god like Lud and 
of a forester from the Forest of Dean like Madawc 
the son of Twrgadarn. With the final drop into 
the Wye Valley over Twt Hill, through which the 
train tunnels, cutting you off from Gloucester, you 
are in debatable land. For Monmouthshire, like 
Alsace and Lorraine, is a mixed country. It is 
not England ; it is not, at any rate in its eastern 



CHEPSTOW AND THE WYE 15 

or Wye borders, Wales. In its wild aspect it is 
absolute Welsh, however, of the unmistakable 
kind found in the old tales, and in the western 
valleys it still speaks the old tongue. It has its 
deep wooded Wye Valley, its strong castles like 
Estrighoeil, Goodrich, or St. Briavel's, built high 
above the river ; its hermit's chapel, like St. 
David's cell above the Chepstow ferry ; and its 
churches, like Llancaut (Llancoed), hid in deep 
riverside coppices. 

Every old bridge, and every new bridge that 
stands where an old one stood, has its traditions. 
Chepstow Bridge has one memory which brings 
home to you the notion of empty space crossed 
by a single giddy plank ; the notion you find in the 
ballad of Sir Owain : — 

" The brigge was as heigh as a tour 
And as scharpe as a rasour, 

And narrow it was also : 
And the water that there ran under 
Brend o' lightning and of thonder, 

That thocht him mickle wo." 

This actual story of the traveller-by-night who 
came late to Chepstow Bridge goes back to the 
day when the Bridge was a wooden one, with 
planks so sprung and tenoned that in case of 
flood they lifted with the water. And it was at 
times, says the local recorder, " very dangerous in 
crossing, because the planks which formed the 
flooring rose and fell with the tide, so that it 
seemed like walking on stilts." Once, after a 
very heavy flood, the bridge had to be put 
under repair, and the flooring was removed, 
only one or two planks being left for foot- 
passengers. The place was well lighted, and a 



16 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

man stationed to warn passengers of their 
danger: but on this particular night it proved 
so stormy that the lights were blown out, and 
the bridge-keeper, concluding that no one would 
attempt to cross, retired to shelter. After mid- 
night, however, a traveller on horseback was 
heard knocking on the door of the inn, at the 
bridge end, affirming that he had just crossed. 
The innkeeper said it was impossible ; but, recog- 
nising the man's voice, he opened the door. In 
the morning the traveller repeated his story of 
having crossed the bridge ; whereupon his host 
took and showed him the plank he must have 
passed over, " at the same time pointing to the 
gulph below." The man was so moved thereupon 
to his vitals by the danger he had unwittingly 
run, that his nerve gave way, and it was some 
time before he could retake his road. 

The oldest Chepstow bridge of all was Roman 
and above the Castle, and the road cutting in the 
steep cliff that led down to it, and some broken 
abutments and piers, could still be seen at low 
water within living memory. This was the work 
of Julius Frontinus, who is credited with giving 
a name to Ystrad Iwl. The first Norman castle 
was only the usual timbered structure on the 
verge of the cliff, and the first builder on the 
site was William FitzOsborn, Earl of Hereford, 
" who cherished an enormous cause by his bold- 
ness," and fortified the place to guard this corner 
of his wide possessions. " He slew many, and 
died by the sword." His son, Roger de Britolio, 
turned rebel, lost Chepstow ; whereafter it fell to 
the Clares and Richard Strongbow. Through 
Richard's daughter, Isabel, it went by marriage 
then to the Marshalls, of whom we shall hear 




TOWN GATE, CHEPSTOW. 
From a drawing by Mr. T. H. Thomas. 



To (ace p. 16. 



CHEPSTOW AND THE WYE 17 

again. These Clares, Strongbows, Marshalls, and 
the rest are hard to individualise ; but among 
them are to be found the originals of the knights 
who live again in the Morte U Arthur and the 
Mabinogion. 

An artist in antiquities once went to Chepstow 
Castle to sketch its walls. But the afternoon was 
sultry and the courts were hot and airless, and 
he ended by sitting down on a wall in one of the 
courts, overcome by the smell of hot ivy, and 
dozing away some centuries. In that taking he 
saw an immense man, dressed in armour, against 
the sky, shining in the sun. The figure stood upon 
the edge of the wall at the landward side of the 
Castle, bright and stiff as a metal figure. 

The sleeper thought, " That is Richard — Richard 
Strongbow — and he is going to fall." 

Thereupon Richard stiffly began to sway and 
topple over, sure enough ; and yet he did not 
quite fall. While the knight was still at that 
uncomfortable angle, the dreamer woke up to 
see a sturdy little parson escorting a tired lady 
o/er the ruins, and telling her everything, without 
pity. It was his voice repeating " Richard 
Strongbow ! " that had evoked the dream. 

To-day, Chepstow Castle, built at as many 
different periods as there are courts contained 
in it, gives you a quite excessive notion of the 
original place. That was a plain keep only, first 
of wood, then of stone, based on the rock, whose 
remains you can discover in the third court, much 
altered later, and now called the Chapel. The 
structure was some ten paces broad and thirty 
long ; and in fact the early Norman castles did not 
give their occupants, if a garrison is allowed for, 
very much room. 

2 



18 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Most of the Castle, as it stands, was of the 
second term ; for there was an Old Castle era 
and a New Castle era to reckon within the castle- 
building centuries ; and Chepstow grew greatly 
as time went on. The earlier type of building, 
built at any time between the Conquest and the 
death of Rufus, was a plain strong-house or keep, 
chiefly made of wood, intended like a larger suit 
of armour to protect a few men ; and it was set 
on a tump, or rock, or any convenient old Roman 
or British site. The latter kind of castle was 
made for comfort in living, as well as for defence : 
the type that grew at last into a huge castellated 
enclosure, like Caerphilly or Alnwick. 

The round towers of the southern end of 
Chepstow Castle, which give so much character 
to the building, and resolve so graciously the 
salient curves and water-worn lines of the Wye 
under the Striguil rock, were built, I believe, by 
Roger Bigod. And finally the true praise of this 
Castle is the recognition of its natural fitness 
there on its river-cliff. Its containing walls and 
towers have a structural relation to the site ; and 
the noble mason-work above, and the natural 
strata below, and the details of the surrounding 
scene are as much of a piece as if man's work 
had grown out of Nature's. This is a test to 
which all buildings, set in fine surroundings, 
must conform, or fail, as so many modern build- 
ings do fail. The tubular railway bridge at 
Chepstow, hard, straight, abrupt, breaks with 
every natural form about it ; and the Castle 
quarrels with it at every juxtaposition. 

The ghost of Henry Marten the Regicide, as I 
said, rather bothers one in exploring Chepstow 
Castle to-day. Within the first court, the tower 



CHEPSTOW AND THE WYE 19 

which imprisoned him at once confronts you on 
the left. The Castle's history is apt in local gossip 
to begin and end with Marten, though he was 
but one among many famous inmates, from Fitz- 
Osborn, who was there first, and the de Clares, 
the great castle-dealers of the south, to Jeremy 
Taylor. But Chepstow Castle saw less fighting in 
mediaeval days than might have been expected, 
because it was so strong. The defences that guard 
its four courts show how strong it was, and as one 
mounts from the river-chamber to the towers and 
gazes eastward upon the Gloucestershire landscape, 
one realises that the place was all but impregnable 
till cannon were invented. After that it had to 
yield to both King and Parliament in turn. In the 
Civil War Cromwell came once to see his guns 
batter it ; but did not stay to see it fall. It was 
in 1645 that, after a desperate siege, Cromwell's 
men, under Colonel Ewer, took the Castle, then 
held by Sir Nicholas Kemeys, with great slaughter. 
The Roundheads revenged themselves for the 
obstinacy of the defence by putting a fourth of 
the garrison to the sword in cold blood, and 
Kemeys among them. A wicked deed, to be re- 
membered as you walk the courts. 

Marten was lucky in his prison, and probably 
lived longer in it than he would have done out 
of it. His acrostic epitaph may be seen in the 
church. It shows a certain vigour and a rough 
wit, such as he was credited with : — 

Here or elsewhere (all's one to you or me), 
Earth, air, or water gripes my ghostless dust ; 
iVone knows how soon to be by fire set free. 
iJeader, if you an oft-tryed rule will trust, 
Fou'll gladly do and suffer what you must." 



20 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

The last line in the Marten verse rings prover- 
bially : — 

"2Vbt how you end, but how you spend your dayes." 

After the Castle has been explored, St. Mary's 
Church can be reached via Bridge Street and 
Church Street. The church has much individu- 
ality; many restorations have not destroyed 
its Norman lines. Its nave suggests that the 
building was originally designed for a priory 
church of some state. The canopied tomb in the 
chancel is that of Henry, second Earl of Worcester, 
who died in 1549. Chepstow Bridge lies at the 
foot of Bridge Street, and brings river, town, and 
Castle into a lazy guide-book perspective, like 
something in an old print. 

I had always thought that Hawker's Hill, one of 
the narrow lower streets, had really been a street 
given up to the hawkers who had used the town 
as a convenient place of resort. But once a farmer, 
walking with me in a field a mile above Tintern, 
said, pointing over the river, "Just there lies 
Hawker's Dyke." He meant Offa's, so I suppose 
Hawker's Hill is Offa's too. G. pointed out a 
window in Hawker's Hill which had evidently 
once been ecclesiastical. Bridge Street, near the 
church, used to be called St. Ann's Street, after 
the chapel of that name, in time turned into a 
bark-house. Oak-bark from the Forest of Dean 
used to be one of the chief exports here. 

The old Cambrian Travellers Guide speaks of 
the Priory of St. Kynemark on "a pleasant emi- 
nence to the west of the town" (not far from 
Piercefield Lodge), which was, like so many re- 
ligious houses, turned into farm walls— at St 



CHEPSTOW AND THE WYE 21 

Kynemark's Farm. Again, " In the town are the 
remains of several chapels. Near the Beaufort 
Arms are two stone buildings, used for a barn and 
coach-house ; one having a Norman and the other 
a pointed-arched doorway. Opposite the Beaufort 
Arms is a small vault, under Fydell's long room ; 
the stone roof is vaulted and engroined. Another 
old religious edifice adjoins Powis's Almhouse. A 
priory for monks of the Benedictine Order was 
founded here soon after the Conquest, called 
Strigule, or Striguil, monastery. It constituted a 
cell to the abbey of Corneille, in Normandy." But 
where is " Fydell's long-room " now ? Lost in an 
irrevocable Georgian antiquity. 

Turning coastwards, on the search for remains, 
you look first for St. Tecla's Chapel, which sailors 
and others call Treacle Chapel, perched on a rock 

I right at the entrance to the Wye. Tecla was the 
daughter of a chief of Gwynedd, old North Wales : 

i how she came so far south I do not know. She 
seems to bear a close resemblance to the type of 
hermitess found in the Sir Percival and Grail 
stories ; indeed, is she not like Sir Percival's sister ? 
Her end was tragic. Both Danish and Irish pirates 
often sailed up the Severn Sea and entered the 
Wye : and one band spied the cell of the unfor- 
tunate Tecla. Let us hope they did not linger 
out her death. 

Before you leave the Wye, the track of the sea- 
raiders who sailed up it and raided places as far 
above Tintern as Symond's Yat ought to tempt 
you to boat up the stream with the tide. The 
Wynd Cliff and Tintern Abbey can be made part 
of the voyage. Last time I saw the abbey, late in 
April, the orchards around it were in full blossom, 
and through every window in turn as one passed 



22 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

the crystal boughs stared in and gave an inde- 
scribable radiance to the walls. It made one think 
of the fabled Apple-Isle : — 

"There blooms the gleaming deathless tree 
Of which the birds with harmony 
Of many a song intone the Hours 
Amid the fragrant apple-flowers. 

And on the silent, listening lawns 
Are flowers of rarest radiance ; 
And shining plains where song is loud 
Lie southward like a silver cloud." 

The companion scene to this belongs to the same 
record. It was a misty morning, not very good 
for such an expedition, and the sight of a house 
— a corn-miller's — which had caught fire the night 
before, whose walls still smouldered and sent 
a thin wisp or two of smoke to join the mist, 
seemed to threaten a bad day. But reaching the 
foot of the Wyndcliff, after skirting some woods 
full of wild-garlic mixed with lily-of-the-valley, 
I decided to climb it from the ridiculous tourist's 
or stage-carpenter's moss-cottage where you pay 
sixpence for the privilege. 

About three-quarters of the way up the mist 
grew lighter, as if some one were puffing it away 
from the trees. Another twenty feet up, and the 
palest blue sky imaginable began to appear over- 
head, with a sun pale-white as a pewter spoon. 
Finally, having reached the summit and gained a 
point where nothing came in the way, I saw the 
mist rolling away below like thin muslin, and 
leaving the lower valley clear. Then, after a 
pause, came the miracle. A sort of second sky 
appeared, uncertainly repeating the first, and in 



CHEPSTOW AND THE WYE 23 

the perspective an aerial promontory and beyond 
that a sailing-vessel were to Ibe discovered ap- 
parently high in air. The lower sky was the 
Sea of Severn, and the vision was that of the 
meeting of the waters in the April sun. There 
lay the Severn (whose great tide often flows 
grey or milk-blue, to ebb tinged with rich mud, 
yellow or brown) like a creature of the sky; and 
the Wye was tricked out with the same light 
bright colours. 



CHAPTER II 

THE " OLD SEVERN CROSSING " — PORTSKEWETT — 
THE SEVERN TUNNEL — WENTWOOD 

Travelling west from Chepstow, you have a 
choice of routes. The ten-mile level between the 
mouth of the Wye and the mouth of the Usk is 
not what most men find exciting and they usually 
contrive to pass it by at high railway speed. But 
it edges a countryside that has at every stage 
some ruined chapel, some fine old house or other, 
some castle like Caldecot on the flat, or Llanvair 
on a hill, that gives history to a scene ; and it is 
backed by one of the few aboriginal extents of 
wild forest left in the country — the forest of Gwent 
or Wentwood. 

The railway for a space runs pretty close to the 
water ; the main road is a couple of miles away 
inland. But you ought to leave the highway after 
passing Pwll Meyrick in order to go and see 
Mathern and Moynes Court : or you can take a 
shorter way across the fields. Mathern has a 
church like an old noble dame, that tells of age 
well borne, and it is so placed as to enlarge its 
Norman details and tall tower. One of the 
Welsh knights or chiefs who became saints, a 
typical romance-figure — Tewdric, petty king of 
Morganwg — lies here ; the founder of the church. 

M 



THE "OLD SEVERN CROSSING" 25 

His epitaph speaks of him as Theodoric " com- 
monly called St. Thewdrick" — accounted a martyr 
because he had taken to a holy life voluntarily, 
giving up his crown to his son. But a Saxon 
invasion called him again to the field. A battle 
at Tintern followed, where he was mortally hurt. 
He begged his son Maurice to carry him home ; 
but the mortal pangs gat hold on him when they 
reached Mathern. There he died, and his last 
wish was that a church should be built on the 
spot. A stone coffin was unearthed there in 1881. 

The wooded rocks at St. Pierre near by start 
up dramatically to tell you of the miles of the 
forestland of Wentwood which Tewdrick hunted. 
In mediaeval days they ran from the sea-borders 
without a break west and north to the Usk 
Valley. It was a perfect romance-forest, a forest 
of the Mabinogion. As you explore it, you find 
at every turn the very trees, or their direct 
offspring, that gave reality to the tales of the 
countryside. " And he did not choose the 
pleasantest and most frequented road, but that 
which was the wildest and most beset by thieves 
and robbers and venomous beasts. And they 
came to a high-road, which they followed till 
they saw a vast forest, and they went towards 
it, and they saw four armed horsemen come 
forth from the forest." This is from a page of 
the Mabinogion — a tale saturated with Gwentian 
local colour and perfume ; and the four armed 
horsemen are its inevitable creatures. They will 
overtake you, if you should follow a road like 
that leading from Caer Went ; they will start out 
again and again from the wood, as you pursue 
your way north-west. 

The right point from which to approach 



26 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Wentwood is from Portskewett, about two 
miles south-west of Mathern, but over three 
by the road round by St. Pierre. You may not, 
remembering the days before the Severn Tunnel 
was made, think of it as a forest landmark ; but 
its name is corrupted from Porth-is-Coed, the port 
under the wood. It is hard now to rescue its 
washed-away waterside purlieus; but they once 
stretched far into the side-channel. Indeed, 
Portskewett figures in the Triads as one of the 
three chief harbours of Wales. You ought to 
take the chance of a very low ebb (say, in a 
dry September) to explore the lines of the lost 
harbour at the aber of the Nedern or Troggy. 
Colonel Morgan pointed out long ago the names 
of spots in the channel, which were once dry 
land. " Gruggy " is a queer name to fish out of 
the salt water, for it comes either from "crugyn," 
a mound or tump ; or Gryg, heather. Bedwin 
means birch-grove ; and other such woody places 
lie drowned off Portskewett. 

Harold built there a house whose foundations 
have left their traces close to the church, and in 
the church itself is a Saxon tympanum, whose 
like is nowhere else to be seen in the country. 
Harold meant to entertain King Edward the 
Confessor in state at the new house, and tradition 
declares they met there. If you turn to Florence 
of Worcester you find the rest of the story, in 
which Tostig, Harold's brother, raided his palace 
and camp, in revenge, it is said, for the preference 
shown to Harold by the King. Harold's Welsh 
raids would make a good fighting saga. They 
are mixed with the deadly feuds of two Gruffydds 
— Gruifydd ab Llewelyn and Gruffydd ab Rhyd- 
derch, of whom the first was a man of temper 



THE "OLD SEVERN CROSSING" 27 

and resource, fit to range with Harold's own 
powers. He deserved better than the cruel death 
he suffered from his own countrymen— the out- 
come of one of the endless Welsh vendettas 
which went on under the tribal order and dis- 
order. 

My recollection of Portskewett dates back to 
the time when there was no Severn Tunnel, and 
travelling from Bristol to Carmarthen, we alighted 
on the Somerset side, to cross by broad-decked 
paddle-boats : a sort of miniature Holyhead-to- 
Kingstown experience. 

Out of all these crossings one made at Easter 
comes back clearly to mind. It was blowing and 
raining hard. The Severn was rough and dirty 
enough for any open sea, tumbling and rolling 
with choppy muddy yellow billows before a west 
wind. It was more daunting than Holyhead 
itself in the teeth of a gale — the flooded Severn, 
about an hour after high water, looked so 
malevolent. The wind, too, in the station at 
Portskewett — crying, buffeting, howling, and 
whistling — was such as only Dickens with his 
uncanny faculty of describing the elements at 
odds with roof and walls, could describe. I have 
often thought of that crossing when being sucked 
through the Severn Tunnel in an air-tight, sul- 
phureous cylinder of a railway compartment in 
about a tenth part of the time : a great saving, 
no doubt, but a traveller's experience not at all 
to be compared with the other. 

More than a generation later, a September even- 
ing took me again to Portskewett. The old water- 
side hotel was an hotel no longer ; but it let me 
have pleasant quarters for the night; and after 
supper I walked under the stars to the waterside, 



28 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

and heard the lazy flap of the tide against the 
causeway, while in the distance sounded what 
seemed to be a noise of forge-hamers, or heavy 
clamping, possibly from the works at Sudbrook. 

An early start next morning brought Crick into 
view betimes, and beyond it the open road to 
Caerwent. There was in the air the sweet, clean 
smell of corn in the field, ready to be led ; and 
flocks of buntings, finches, and hedge-sparrows, 
swoln with new wheat, were to be spied flying up 
as some harvest cart or stray harvester disturbed 
them. But the high-road was almost empty. 
The only being I met during the first half-mile 
was a black man, in what might be a seaman's 
Sunday clothes. What was he doing on the road 
from Caerwent ? When he had gone by, far ahead 
of me, a string of what looked rather like a troop 
of women, continually changing their order and 
crossing to and fro, appeared on the dusty highway. 
Presently, one of them fell down, and then they 
resolved themselves into a troop of school children. 
Just below the rise to Caerwent village, where 
one tries to figure the last entrance to the old 
Roman town, I overtook them. The child that had 
fallen was a small boy, fair-haired, burstingly 
plump and well cared for ; he was still sobbing in a 
perfunctory way ; while two little girls held his fat 
hand and several others formed a body-guard in 
white pinafores, behaving as if he was a hero being 
led in triumph to the camp. A penny dried his tears. 
In the last glimpse I had, the youngsters were clus- 
tered like white butterflies round a small village 
shop, with lollypops in the window ; no doubt very 
like those on which the small boys and girls of the 
camp formerly spent their Roman halfpence. 

Everywhere at Caerwent the Roman illusion 



THE "OLD SEVERN CROSSING" 29 

keeps cropping out in the Monmouth village. The 
excavation-field had just revealed, when I saw it, a 
gateway in a ten-foot cutting, out of which climbed 
a labourer. The resurrection of a live Roman 
soldier in helmet and tunic, or a slave with his 
rations, a solid wheaten cake, in his hand, would 
not have been much more startling. The wheaten 
cake was suggested by a twopenny loaf which I 
saw a Roman baker handing in at a door. 

But Caerwent, though they do say, mixing no 
doubt the traditions of two Caers in Gwent, that 
the sea once came up to its walls, is too far from our 
main route to be further exploited here. Every 
year the archaelogical men are laying bare more of 
the old lines of the Roman city ; and its map will 
be made and its record written, plain as that of 
Pompeii, some five or six years hence. 

If you return to Portskewett from Caerwent, you 
can take another road back, via Caldecot, after ex- 
ploring the old wall and round buttress behind and 
below the church. Caerwent Church itself, by the 
way, is half Roman, its walls being largely built out 
of the old buildings of the Caer. In about a mile 
and a half this road brings you to Caldecot village, 
and so to the Castle ; one of the few purposely built 
in this country on a wet site, with the marsh used 
for defence. 

It was a hot, sleepy afternoon when I reached 
Caldecot on my way back from Caerleon. No 
wayfarers at all were on the road, and in the 
scattered village doors were shut and houses 
seemed asleep. Outside an inn a hawker's cart was 
standing ; the people in the churchyard were not 
quieter than those in the houses. It was hard to 
find any one to serve as a key-bearer to the Castle, 
which is not open every day to the public. It was 



30 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

equally hard, having reached it, to imagine it had 
ever been meant for war by the De Bohuns, so 
deep was the afternoon quiet about its sunburnt 
mounds and round towers. 

Caldecot Castle was built in three pieces at three 
different times. The four or five carved Maloresque 
heads on the west side of the machicolated gateway 
tempt one to think the whole building later than it 
is. The oldest part is the keep, on its made mound, 
with its queer excrescent smaller tower, which 
leaves one conjecturing if a live cock or a larger 
biped was walled up in it. There is some mystery 
about it. This was built about 1150-1175. After 
that the De Bohuns went on building from time to 
time, and occasionally pulled down an old piece to 
make a new. The whole area covered is enough 
for a whole village. The ruins came at length into 
the hands of a most conscientious restorer in Mr. 
Cobb, its present owner, who gives us a wonderful 
idea of the place in its fighting prime. In his car- 
toon the main structure fairly bristles with timber, 
rather like an ironclad with its torpedo spars out. 
Caldecot's towers and walls have great corbels and 
big holes (going through the parapet), which must 
have been intended to hold timber struts for active 
defence. In this extraneous timbering one has a 
relic possibly of the earlier kind of Norman castle, 
which was mainly a wooden erection with stone 
ballast, earthen dyke, and bristling palisade. 

Caldecot is another of the places that get their 
name from the neighbouring forest — Wentwood. 
In Welsh, it is Cil-y-Coed — edge of the wood. The 
De Bohuns, its lords and chief builders, were earls 
of Hereford ; and their family history and some 
of its scrolls will be found worth deciphering. The 
De Bohun shield, with its golden lioncels rampant 



THE "OLD SEVERN CROSSING" 31 

(Humphrey, the fourth earl, figured six of them 
in an azure field, with a bend argent cotised or), 
seems designed for the ornate knights of the later 
Mabinogion, or one to be borne by Sir Gilbert in the 
Morte D Arthur. There was a Sir Gilbert de Bohun 
whose shield had the lioncels too, but distinguished 
by having his bend or with three escallops gules 
charged upon it. 

"In that tyme was the manner so, 
Whan yonge knightis shuld sheldis show." 

One would like to know how much of the founda- 
tions of Caldecot, which had to be well and surely 
found in that marshy site, came from Caerwent. 

From Caldecot it is about a mile to Sudbrook 
Camp. The camp is on the very edge of the Severn, 
which has been eating away the site slowly all 
these years. There you realise again the old Severn 
Sea of the primitive invaders and the three invasions 
of this coast. The camp was one of many which 
seem to have been made with some general idea of 
connected use along the Severn estuary. On the 
Bristol side there was Oldbury, and nearly opposite 
it, on the Chepstow side, Sedbury ; Beachley and 
St. Tecla's could be seized and held at need. The 
Danes who made — or in some cases adopted — these 
camps, returned yearly to the Severn and the Wye. 
The evidence of the fight at Symond's Yat, and 
the tales of the Welsh Saints, lend weight to an 
earlier custom of this kind. But the later security 
of this coast is shown at Sudbrook by the site of 
the chapel. It stood within the very dyke of the 
Danes' Camp, a ruin to be named with other dis- 
mantled chapels on the Welsh coast. 

Sudbrook Chapel has not been used for church 



32 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

service now for two centuries and more. The last 
certain notice of its use dates back to 1755, and to 
the burial of a sea-captain, by name Blethyn Smith. 
The old place appealed to him, as did Mathern to 
more than one bishop. He asked in his will to be 
buried " in the eastern end of the chancel of the 
decayed church of Sudbrook, as near the wall as 
may be, attended by six seafaring men as bearers 
— my coffin covered with the ensigns of colours of 
a ship instead of a pall." A brass plate was put 
on the wall over his grave, but it has long since 
disappeared. At Sudbrook you can still picture 
the ship-master's funeral — especially if there should 
be a Bristol barque going down channel to help 
you to recall the old days before steam came in. 
Then the ship's boat and the six sailors give way 
to a Viking's war-vessel, such as that they dug out 
of the mud in making Newport Docks, and the 
chapel vanishes and you see the Danish pirates 
run into the neighbouring pill and prepare to 
use the camp as a base for their next raid inland. 
Much history lies embedded in the mud bank at 
Sudbrook. 



CHAPTER III 

NEWPORT, OR NEWCASTLE-UPON-USK — ST. WOOLOS'S 
AND STOW HILL — REBECCA'S DAUGHTERS AND 
THE SEVERN PIRATES — A WELSH MINNESINGER. 

You may go to Newport to-day and spy there 
only a great commercial city and a seaport in 
the making. For as you cross the Usk by rail 
you may chance to miss a passing glimpse of the 
Castle above the water or the tidal mud. Outside 
the station yard, too, everything that first appears 
is aggressively new and crude — the trams, the big, 
motley buildings, the busy vista right and left. 
But amid the hubbub you can, with a little 
patience, find the lines of the old town that lay 
between " Castell-ar- Wysg " and the noble old 
church of St. Gwynllyw up Stow Hill. 

Its place on the coast at the mouth of the Usk 
brought it custom formerly, just as its docks and 
railways do now. To-day the " new-castle," newest 
of the town, is the railway station. Many years 
ago, when trains used to be parliamentary and 
slow as reform, a small party of travellers got 
to Newport one wet evening, after some twelve 
hours' weary travel. They had come all the 
way from the other Newcastle (upon-Tyne), but 
alighted here to change trains for Carmarthen, 
much too hungry to think of any connection 

3 33 



34 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

the two towns might happen to have. In half 
an hour more the Milford night mail would pass : 
and (for I was one of the party) we had time for 
tea in the refreshment-room : wonderful, strong, 
well-stewed tea, and delicious thin bread and 
butter of home-made Welsh bread such as you 
never see in refreshment- rooms nowadays. Again, 
many years later, when the National Eisteddfod 
was held in the town, it fell to me to watch some 
forty trains arrive one afternoon and disgorge 
their crowds. Welsh hill-folk, country people, 
miners from the mining valleys, singing men and 
girls, small, bright-eyed women, and strings of 
children went by in that crowd. It gave one the 
sense of a people en fete, a nation in movement. 
My anxiety about one atom in that multitude, 
the one expected face that did not arrive, lent a 
painful interest to all those phantasmagoric faces. 
It occurred to me then that we have the same 
anxiety on a railway platform to-day that our 
forbears had in the embrasure of a castle, or in 
a wattled booth of the Gwentian hills five, six, 
seven centuries ago. Our surroundings change ; 
our emotions never. 

For a picture of Tudor Newport, turn to Leland. 
He speaks of the great stone gate by the bridge ; 
a second in " the High strete to passe thorough, 
and the 3(rd) at the west end of the toune." He 
adds that " the fairest of the toun " is all in one 
street, and that the town is in ruin. He describes 
it another time as " a pretty strong town " ; but 
"I marked not whyther yt were waulled or no." 
However, the walls, as well as the three gates, 
were standing and in good order then ; and the 
office of the Murenger was still kept up. 

The Castle dates back to 1140, or earlier, when 




m 




■ 



e^" ! ji 







■ 




NEWPORT 35 

it was begun by Robert, Earl of Gloucester, who 
had married Mabel, daughter of Fitzhamon. The 
year is one to be double-scored in the Gwent tra- 
dition. Robert was a great castle-builder; a shrewd 
intervener, too, between the two peoples from 
whose marriage he sprang ; and his nephew was 
Giraldus Cambrensis, a pioneer of the new literary 
life of the country. As parcel of the lordship of 
Morganwg, Newport often figures in the traffic 
betwixt the Welsh and Normans. When Henry 
II., on his return from Ireland, recalling his 
long dispute with Iorwerth ap Owain of Caer- 
leon, paused at Newport in 1171-1172, he sent a 
safe-conduct to Iorwerth and his two sons, that 
they might come and do homage and settle their 
grievances on either side. But some soldiers of 
Newport intercepted and slew, near Usk, Iorwerth's 
eldest son when he was on the way to join his 
father, and Iorwerth, seeing in it very naturally 
Henry's treachery, went home vowing revenge. 
Calling the Welsh around him, he marched through 
Gwent into Gloucester, doing great havoc. New- 
port Castle, after the death of Earl Robert and 
Mabel his wife, passed through the hands of many 
famous owners, including the De Clares and De 
Spencers. In the year 1615 we hear of it as in ruins. 
Newport was a walled town formerly, with three 
town gates, the last of which left standing was 
in the High Street. The house of the Murenger, 
whose office was to act as wall-keeper and toll- 
collector, was still to be seen a hundred years 
ago, near the High Street gateway. 

We must leave the lower town now and go up 
Stow Hill to St. Woollos's, and look from the 
church on the crowded landscape — streets upon 
streets, houses and chimneys, docks and railways 



36 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

— where once was the green prospect that Gwynl- 
lyw called after the ox with the black spot — 
Dutelich. Gwynllyw's Church, as you must know, 
got corrupted by degrees into St. Woollos's — one 
of many changes that came about in the anglicising 
of the Welsh place-names. 

Now, St. Woollos's is a church wherein you see 
what it is always interesting to see — the different 
stages and layers of its growth. It has a fair 
tower, a still fairer Norman door ; but its peculiar 
feature is the aboriginal building, some fifteen 
paces long, between the tower and the later 
church. This is known as St. Mary's Chapel ; and 
Mr. Baring-Gould, who has a keen eye for eccentric 
antiquity, points out the resemblance between this 
early building and the low western ante-chapel at 
the abbey-church of St. Fronto, Perigueux. Both 
represent the original early Christian church, he 
says, built on these sites. If this be so, then 
Gwynllyw probably lies here, under the floor of 
St. Mary's Chapel. 

As you look over the Sea of Severn and the 
great seaport from Stow Hill, you have several 
sea tales to call to mind which belong to the 
scene — one of them to the very church itself. In 
early days the Severn Sea was a notorious pirates' 
run. The Danish raiders often brought their boats 
into the Usk, and you have heard how they mur- 
dered St. Tecla in her islet at the mouth of the 
Wye. An old Danish ship was found here in 1878, 
when the Alexandra Dock was being enlarged. 
It lies in the town Museum now. It was some 
seventy feet long and, at its full beam, twenty feet 
wide. What became of the crew ? To answer this 
you must turn to the saga of the Orcadians, the 
sacrilegious Welsh King of the North, and the 



NEWPORT 37 

Holy Gwynllyw, who became the Terrible Rider 
of the Elements. 

Griffith, King of the North, driven by war from 
his own land, and fearing his enemies (whom 
William, the old King of the English, subdued), 
sailed to the Orcades. There, bent on revenge 
and piracy, he got the Orcadians to join him 
and descend on the coasts of Britain. Twenty- 
four large warships made their fleet, with which 
they sailed through the Irish Sea, and at length 
made their way into the Sea of Severn. There 
they landed at the mouth of the Usk, and, armed 
with lances and axes, ravaged and spoiled the 
country. These wicked raiders spied as they went 
the church of St. Woollos, which had been locked 
for protection against their thieving hands. But 
they broke it open, and stole the precious vessels 
that were there and carried them off to their ships, 
and so to the Isle of Barry. There, however, 
grievous trouble and great sorrow began to gather 
over them, and they were driven to embark and 
hoist sail for the Orcades. 

But terror of judgment! no sooner were they 
at sea than they saw a tremendous figure, a terrible 
horseman riding in the sky, riding after them 
night and day, pursuing them wherever they 
turned without cease. That giant Horseman of 
the Elements, who could he be ? He was the holy 
Gwynllyw, who was sent from heaven to overtake 
and punish them in their sins. Their vessels' sails 
were torn by the raging violence of the winds ; 
nor by their oars could they make headway, while 
their compass was broken, and the sailors cried, 
" Evil is our shipmate, we fight Powers immortal 
and beyond us ; the fighting of mortal man is 
vain ! " 



38 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

With that the vessels were driven on the rocks, 
and all save two were wrecked and broken in 
pieces ; and even the men that might have been 
saved in a frenzy rushed against and destroyed 
one another. Only two ships were saved ; and 
these were King Griffith's, who would not partake 
of the robbery or enter the church ; and he it was 
who, when he had made peace with King William, 
told him how the Holy Gwynllyw had come from 
heaven to avenge the desecration of his church by 
the fierce pirates of the Orcades. 

The more one thinks of this legend the stranger 
it grows ; but the part in it of King Griffith is 
rather sinister. He lured on the Orcadians to 
their doom, but he escaped. He was their Ate. 

One more story of St. Woollos's, and we are 
done. It is important, because it shows the real 
cause of the defeat of Harold at the battle of 
Hastings. It appears that in Earl Harold's time 
ship's toll was paid by ships lying in the mouth 
of the Usk. But one day a Saxon trading-vessel 
came to port, and refused to pay ; and Rogut (a 
grandson of King Griffith) thereupon cut its 
anchor-cable, and carried off the anchor to St. 
Woollos's Church. But the sailors complained to 
Earl Harold, and he, moved with great anger, 
began to lay waste all the country of Wentloog. 
The Gwentians carried their goods and country 
produce — corn and meat and cheese — to the church ; 
but the greedy wolves broke in there and, without 
seeing the lost anchor, began to steal all they 
could lay hands on. Then to satisfy their hunger 
they cut into the cheeses brought by the country- 
folk ; but behold, the cheeses were all red and 
bloody inside ! Harold's men, horrified at this 
sight, began hastily to restore all they had stolen ; 



NEWPORT 39 

and Earl Harold himself, pricked with compunc- 
tion, made an offering on the altar, and promised 
he would never more violate that blessed sanctu- 
ary. But all in vain ; for it befell that in the 
following month Harold was slain at the battle 
of Hastings by William of Normandy for this and 
his other sins and wickednesses. 

While you are on Stow Hill you may recall the 
strange hubbub that used to be heard there at 
Stow Fair, up to the year 1870. Hogarth alone 
could do justice to the scenes that used to startle 
the Fair-field and surround the Bull Inn and the 
old Six Bells Inn and even the churchyard of St. 
Woollos's, in the palmy days when thousands of 
miners and ironworkers came in from the mining 
valleys. Almost every whitewashed cottage on 
Stow Hill had its two or three barrels of beer at 
its door to supply the extraordinary thirst of the 
droughty ironworkers and other folk on this gaudy 
day ; and next morning, it is said, the fields were 
sown with strange and unhappy objects — the men 
who had been sleeping off their debauch. Yes, only 
Hogarth or the author of " The Sleeping Bard " 
could describe the drinking carnival of Stow Hill 
as it used to be seen. 

A Welsh Hogarth, too, could best draft for us 
another riotous spectacle of the period : the 
Chartist march on the town on the 4th of Novem- 
ber, 1839. It seems as if the old tradition that 
made the Castle below and St. Woollos's above 
fighting landmarks were being maintained. The 
mayor faced the rioters and read the Riot Act 
from the windows of the Westgate Hotel, in whose 
wainscot bullet-marks may still be seen. The 
rioters were themselves led by a quondam magis- 
trate, John Frost, who had himself been four times 



40 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

mayor of Newport. He was a man of eccentric 
and combative temper, who had been struck off 
the justices' roll by Lord John Russell because of 
his noisy opinions and irrepressible Radicalism. 
He was not unlike some of the early chiefs of 
Gwent, who were always at war ; for he was tire- 
less in opposition. But while they sometimes, like 
Gwynllyw, grew pious and became hermits and 
saints, when the energies of youth gave out, Jack 
Frost never suffered his mind to thaw. Possibly 
he did not manage his riot very well : he did little, 
it is certain, to save his men from panic when 
the word was given and the soldiers fired from 
the windows of the Westgate Hotel. He and 
two other leaders were sentenced to death, and 
then reprieved and transported, for their part in 
the affair. Fifteen years later they were pardoned, 
and Frost returned home a septuagenarian, and 
lived twenty-three years more, his zeal for reform 
as keen as ever, to die in 1877. There is all the 
material of grotesque romance in his long and 
chequered tale, from the days when he was a draper 
with a taste for battle and a town mayor to his 
march on Newport, his death-sentence and trans- 
portation, and his return safe home to an unabated 
old age. He had every wish to be a popular hero, 
and, most significant fact, he lived to see every one 
of the popular reforms he had fought for carried 
out. 

There are still a few notable shy spots near 
Newport worth discovering, though the guide- 
books avoid them. The other-self of a country is 
often to be surprised in these overgrown haunts, 
one of which asks for a page or more here at 
the end of the chapter. It is one that calls up 
the figure of Dafydd ab Gwilym, the Poet of the 



NEWPORT 41 

Leaves, a fourteenth-century Welsh Minnesinger 
who was, all told, the most exquisite rhymer and 
the most imaginative Wales has had. The whole 
country was his ; he roamed its leagues of forest, 
a blessed vagabond, and knew it from end to end. 
But in this country the base of his journeys was 
always the house at Gwern-y-Cleppa, near Maes- 
Aleg, now called Bassaleg — the house of Ivor Hael 
or Ivor the Generous. 

It was one very sultry August afternoon when 
I set off to find the place in the wood where stood 
the ancient mansion of Ivor Hael. Beyond Bassa- 
leg Station the dirt and smoke and grimy disorder 
of the colliery village made the heat thrice intoler- 
able ; but once the bridge over the river Ebwy was 
crossed I began to recover with an effort the lines 
of the fair green countryside that Dafydd knew. 
A by-road led me past a small farm, Fynnon Oer 
(Cold Well) to a field-path that skirted a wooded 
hill. With that hill for a shield from the outer 
world it was possible to believe in Ivor Hael. 
Across a broad dip and long meadow lay a wood, 
Gwern-y-Cleppa. There used to stand Ivor's 
vanished mansion, above which the air should 
still be stained with bands of firelight and more 
iridescent gleams than commonly fall through the 
trees of a wood. 

One unlucky detour on the way led to an opening 
where a dead bullock had been dumped for the 
hounds or young pheasants of Ivor's successor. 
This made me hastily invoke the fine spirit of 
invective that Dafydd had always at hand where- 
with to relieve himself in his predicaments. 
Happily the exact site, which I had overshot, was a 
breathing distance away. Standing on one of the 
foundation- walls, which Ivor's descendant, Lord 



42 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Tredegar, had recently unearthed, and, looking 
around, I found it possible to imagine away the 
later undergrowth and detect the actual lines of 
the close, the long, low house with its end-gables 
and blunt-thatched roof, and the green pleasaunce 
about it. To adapt some lines of Dafydd's, de- 
scribing another house in another wood, far from 
here, where he and his love Morfudd used to meet : — 

And I the man or woodman who 
Must walk the wood, and watch, and through 
The small-leav'd trees look as I pace 
To spy the roof there break the space, — 
A palace pack'd within a croft, 
With green leaves for an organ loft : 
Song's House, whose eaves no painter could 
Ever have painted, none but God." 

In Ivor's house, said Dafydd, he was always sure 
of a welcome. The grace-cup was waiting to 
receive him at the door ; his glove was filled with 
gold as he went away. 

He was once rallied by a follower of Sir Peter le 
Sore, who said the bottom of one of Sir Peter's 
cups was worth all the cups in Ivor's house. To 
which Dafydd answered, " That the bottom of a 
cup might be valued in Sir Peter's house, but not 
in Ivor's, since the bottom of a cup was never 
seen there" for the exhaustless wine within it. 
Indeed, in more than one of his lyric odes Dafydd 
harps upon the " medd a gwin " — mead and wine — 
at Maesaleg, and he talks of Ivor as Father-of-all- 
Cheer. There is a song of parting, written when 
he was going on his Trouveur's journey to the 
north — one of those bardic circuits which the Welsh 
called " Clera " — whose rhymes are Ivor's joyous 
apotheosis. They are partly conceived in the tradi- 



NEWPORT 43 

tional " high-falutin " mode of the Welsh family 
bard who sings the eulogy of his Maecenas ; but we 
discern at once in them, too, the note, breaking con- 
vention, of the original poet who used tradition 
or dropped it at will, and saw with his own eyes, 
and made his harp-strings out of his own Welsh 
sinews. 

At Gwern-y-Cleppa, says Dafydd, he was like one 
of the three free fortunate guests at the court of 
King Arthur (" Tri thryddedog ac anfoddog Llys 
Arthur"). During the third quarter of the four- 
teenth century Ivor was in his flourish, and held 
his court here in the great old Welsh fashion. 
He and his wife Nest died of the plague about 
13G8, and the fatal news reached Dafydd as he 
travelled from the north to Llanbadarn in Cardi- 
ganshire, where his own house was. 

A passage or so from his odes, written in the 
fluid four-footed couplets he preferred — a form 
that, Welsh as it is, relates him to the whole poetic 
mode of Europe at that time — must serve here as a 
taste of his art. He is very fond of writing colour- 
odes, ranged in one colour, as, for instance, among 
his white poems, a Swan-ode, a Snow-ode, a Haw- 
thorn-ode ; or, among his yellow, a Broom-song, or 
a song of his golden-haired beloved Morfudd. Take 
this foretaste as a Study in Gold, some lines of 
which he used twice over in separate poems with- 
out any hesitation. He is describing Morfudd's 
hair, whose " wine-bright laughing mouth " and 
whose cheeks, red as the Rose or the Rosy Cross, 
were his delight : — 

"Ami o eurlliw, mal iarlles, 
Gerllaw y tal, gorlliw tes ; 
Ac uwch ei deurudd rhyddawr 
Dwybleth fal y dabl o aur." 



44 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Largesse of gold he wants to impress on you in 
this lyric picture : " Gold-colour, repeated over and 
over, like a countess's, about the forehead, with 
the high colour of sunshine ; and above the two 
cheeks, red-gold — two broad plaits like the Golden 
Tables' : For the unbraiding of them, long it might 
take ; — such gold braids I have seen her let fall, 
like the wings of a yellow Archangel drooping 
upon white snow. Shoots, say of one stem ; coils 
of one colour ; a grove of yellow broom above the 
face ; ay, gold-jewels like them in the shops of 
Chepe." 

You get in this a suggestion of the true 
poetic ecstasy of the creature. The shops of Cheap- 
side, too, had touched his errant fancy ; he often 
returns to them, indeed, in his odes, and makes one 
think of the " Golden Cheapside " that Herrick 
knew centuries later. Probably the Welsh poet, 
too, had made one visit to London in Ivor's train, 
or in that of some Autolycus of the shires and 
" hundreds." 

As you pass again through Newport streets you 
can stop before a jeweller's window in the High 
Street if you will, realising that a far greater town 
than the London of Dafydd's time has sprung up 
within a league of Ivor's house at Maesaleg. 



CHAPTER IV 

CAERLEON-ON-USK— THE OLD CITY OF LEGIONS — 
ECHOES OF THE " MORTE D'ARTHUR " — ROMAN 
LADIES AND BRITISH PRINCES. 

"Both Athens, Theabes, and Carthage too, 
We hold of great renown, 
What then, I pray you, shall we do 
To poor Caerleon towne." 

Chubchyard. 

You may not think of Caerleon at once as a 
shipping-place ; but it was once, in the day of 
small ships, a well-known Severn Sea port. It 
was the old port of Usk, as its neighbour three 
miles nearer the mouth of the river was the New- 
port. One reason for having a shipping-quay 
farther from the river-mouth may have been be- 
cause it was safer from Severn pirates. And, after 
all, it is not so far inland as are many famous 
ports to-day — the other Newcastle, for instance. 
We reached and crossed the bridge late one 
September evening, having, on the road out of 
Newport, passed St. Julian's in the dark without 
realising it. A light drizzle was falling, and the 
town was like a deserted place, whose darkness 
was but made more apparent by the few street- 
lamps and a dimly lit shop-window. It might 



46 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

have been a benighted town of the Middle Ages ; 
and I think we were not altogether sorry for the 
illusion. 

Having found quarters at our appointed hostelry, 
we sallied out, while a simple mediaeval supper of 
ham-collops and eggs was preparing, for further 
exploration. Across the street a very dim paraffin- 
lamp burned in a shop- window. Out of curiosity 
we gazed in, and saw faded jam-tarts there of an 
unnatural pallor and antiquity, and some slate- 
pencils. In such a shop, precisely, gazed the Roman 
boys long ago, save that there were no dulled 
panes of glass between. We resumed our wander- 
ings, and saw another light, far away, which 
proved to be a wooden lamp-post — old, and even 
immensely old ; older than Lucius, older than 
Severus and his two sons, older than Merlin and 
Arthur. 

We dimly made out at the south-east side of the 
town what we took for the mound of the Castle, 
where the Norman keep had stood, and it recalled 
how the boy-king Arthur came out of his tower, 
and " under his gown a jesseraunt of double mail" ; 
when King Lot had laughed at him and called 
Merlin a witch ; and how a battle was fought 
between Arthur and the kings of Garloth and 
Gower. 

" What will ye do ? " said Merlin to them. " Ye 
were better for to stint. Ye shall not here prevail, 
though ye were ten so many." 

"Be we well advised to be afraid of a dream- 
reader ? " said King Lot. 

With that Merlin vanished away. You may 
continue the tale in the Morte D 'Arthur. 

It was in Caerleon, too, that Arthur held his 
Whitsuntide feast, " in the most royalest wise that 



CAERLEON-ON-USK 47 

might be, like as he did yearly," when, according 
to the famous old king's custom, he refused to eat 
till some portent or strange adventure came to 
light; and the predestined mysterious damsel of 
romance entered, and after her Gawain and 
Launcelot and Beaumains. And it was to Caer- 
leon that disturbing letters came, addressed to 
Arthur and Gwenevere and Launcelot — all from 
King Mark ; and King Arthur " mused of many 
things " ; and Sir Launcelot was so wroth that 
I he laid him down on his bed to sleep," the letter 
in his hand ; and Dinadan " stole the letter out of 
his hand, and read it word by word," and as a 
consequence made his lay of King Mark, and 
taught it to one harper, who taught it in turn 
to many harpers, who went singing it through 
Wales and Cornwall, " which was the worst lay 
that ever harper sang with harp or with any other 
instruments." 

Next morning we rose from bed, I remember, 
with a sense of being unequal to our antique 
opportunity. Looking out of window, I saw a 
milk-cart driving by ; it was built in the precise 
model of an old British chariot. The rain, too, 
was falling in a traditional British way. Luckily 
we had the Museum as a resource. 

A little more and Caerleon Museum, which looks 
externally like the toy model of a classic temple, 
might have been a perfect village monument. As 
it is, one does not find it easy on a wet morning 
to rekindle any Roman warmth in its cold stones, 
or set free the rustling garments of a Csesaria, or 
picture the wife of Cornelius Castus, with her old 
silver brooch clasping the kerchief about her neck 
and silver bracelets on her folded arms. But the 
thought of that poor child, Julia Iverna, who died 



48 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

at sixteen and was buried at Bulmore, and whose 
mother must have loved her very dearly, presently 
opens this house of the dead. The ornaments of 
both of them are there ; and some of the inscrip- 
tions that recall them, and some of the flakes and 
remnants whose shining may have helped to dazzle 
the eyes of the early Welsh romancists, a Geoffrey 
or a Gerald, are there too. What is very attractive 
to our eyes is the way in which flakes and bits 
of mediaeval glass and small metal ornaments of 
Gerald's time — the twelfth century — are mixed with 
those of the day when Tacitus wrote. This is the 
great secret which Caerleon keeps close. It has 
mixed its memories, like its relics ; and when for 
the twentieth time you are trying to separate the 
Roman soldiers from Arthur's men, and the Roman 
lines from the later walls and castellated defences 
added by a Llewelyn whose gryphon (on a bit of 
glass) is still to be seen, you suddenly realise that 
Arthurian tradition was partly grown on a Roman 
wall, and has kept the faint aroma of a thousand 
classical associations. 

It was the second Legion that lay at Caerleon ; 
and here, in the time of Claudius under Vespasian, 
its headquarters were maintained while its men 
fought and built, went off to the north in detach- 
ments, to help in the road-building and raising of 
the walls and forts of the North Tyne and Border 
country. Not only that ; but they were the chief 
builders of the great sea-walls raised to protect 
the Level of Caldecot and the Level of Gwynllwg 
(Wentloog) from the Severn Sea. The busts or 
statues of a line of famous generals, and one or 
two emperors, would have to be set round the 
walls of Caerleon Museum, like those in the cor- 
ridor of emperors at the British Museum, if we 



CAERLEON-ON-USK 49 

were to rally to our aid all the contributors to the 
fame of the City of Legions. Yes, Agricola, and 
Severus, and Caracalla, and Geta, and Suetonius, 
and Constantine — who left Britain not so long 
before the supposed advent of Arthur. 

When you recall Geoffrey of Monmouth's 
blazoned triumph of King Arthur in the City of 
Legions, you see clearly how Roman were its 
features : Roman, viewed at the end of an early 
mediaeval vista, like a marble colonnade seen 
through stained glass. Geoffrey tells us how 
Arthur, after a series of Roman triumphs — not 
unlike Caesar's own — after campaigns in Norway, 
Dacia, Aquitania, Gaul, after holding court at 
Paris, decides to hold a solemn thanksgiving, 
and pitches upon the City of Legions for that 
purpose. 

" Upon the approach of the feast of Pentecost, 
Arthur," says Geoffrey, " resolved to hold a mag- 
nificent court, to place the crown upon his head, 
and to invite all the kings and dukes subject to 
him to that solemnity. And he pitched upon the 
City of Legions as a fit place wherein to hold it ; 
for besides its wealth, great beyond that of other 
cities, its site upon the river Usk, near the Severn 
Sea, was most pleasant and fit for so high a 
solemnity. On one side it was washed by that 
noble river, so that those kings and princes who 
came from beyond the seas might readily sail up 
to the city. On the other side, the beauty of the 
groves and meadows, and the magnificence of the 
royal palaces with high gilded roofs adorning it, 
made it rival even the grandeur of Rome." 

And it had, continues Geoffrey, two churches, 
one dedicated to the martyr Julius, and adorned 
by a choir of virgins, while the other, dedicated to 

4 



50 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

St. Aaron, was the third church metropolitan of 
Britain. Besides, there was a college of two 
hundred wise men and astronomers, who could 
tell Arthur by the stars what events were to 
happen at that time. 

To Caerleon came, among the kings, Sater, King 
of Dyved, Cador, King of Cornwall, Cadwaladon, 
King of North Wales, Augusel (Angus ?), King of 
Scotland, Urien, King of "Mureif." The three 
Archbishops of York, and London, and Caerleon 
(observe the equation of the last with the two 
first metropolitan sees) attended, too, in state. 
The last of the three arch-prelates was Dubricius, 
otherwise Dyvrig the Golden Tongued. 

The present parish church of Caerleon is dedi- 
cated to Cadoc, for Llangattock is the parish in 
which the City of Legions stands. Its eccle- 
siastical tradition waxed and grew with its 
Arthurian myths. If it was a king's capital — 
why not an archbishop's seat ? Dyvrig, and 
Cadoc, and David lend it their associations, and 
they build up its House of Fame, and bring tradi- 
tion to the point where the Church was able to 
perpetuate it, and delicately idealise it, and join a 
Constantine legend to an Arthur legend, and put 
a halo about a Roman helmet ; and magnify a 
simple hermit in his cave to the seventh dimen- 
sion, till he towers, a prince, a primate of his 
Church. 

Wonderful Caerleon, that can lift heroes, like 
pieces of ivory, from its dust ! Arthur and Seve- 
rus, Gwenevere and Coesaria and Julia Iverna, 
Cadoc and David : they are the personages of 
its story. 

To recall the Roman Isca Silurum, you ought to 
climb Christchurch Hill and look back from the 



CAERLEON-ON-USK 51 

road as it nears the village. Then, imagine an 
extent of marsh-lands and tidal " rhines " (as they 
are called on either side of the Severn Sea) all 
about the City of Legions, and the city itself, 
square, very definite, very compact, raised on higher 
ground ; with four straight roads approaching its 
four gates, south, east, west, and north. At the south 
gate the approach is by a twenty-two feet wide 
trestle-built bridge. The same bridge to all intents 
and purposes, patched from time to time, lasted 
on to modern times ; lasted long enough for the 
Normans to build new defences at either end in 
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and for some 
of the Chartists to cross it on their way to New- 
port in 1839, and for Tennyson to walk over 
it in 1856. It was finally demolished about fifty 
years ago. 

You can better picture the splendour of the 
place when you remember that it was one of the 
three great Roman centres in Britain. You can 
see the streets, the people, the officers' wives, 
the soldiers ; here, in the heart of the town, are 
the houses, most of them either one-storied or 
having a lower storey of stone and an upper of 
timber, with timbered and shingled roofs. In 
the Forum, or market-building, there are steps 
and a colonnade ; and on the steps are beggars, 
British market-women, and a Roman lady chaffer- 
ing with one of them for a basket of apples or a 
jar of honey, a couple of barley-cakes or a brace 
of wild duck. One amphitheatre we trace by the 
oval called King Arthur's table; and of other 
extra-mural adjuncts we know there was one 
burial-place at Bulmore and another two miles 
further away. And within the walls are baths, 
cool porticoes, a couple of temples ; and perhaps a 



52 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

corner of the city where, as time went on, a couple 
of marble and stone arches and a column arose 
to mark some of the Roman triumphs in Britain. 
Every fragment you have in Caerleon Museum 
represents a whole. A single Roman brick, and 
Caerleon is rebuilt. You can still see Roman 
figures and Welsh knights pass in the town as 
you look back from Christchurch Hill — forms that 
seem to appear for a moment at the end of the 
street and then to disappear like a mirage. The 
recent excavations by the Roman surveyors have 
made the actual details of the place clear as 
Pompeii's. 

According to Donovan in his tour of 1801, 
there was a Caerleon tradition that Arthur 
and his knights disappeared into the old amphi- 
theatre. 

"And here," says Donovan, "we were assured 
with the utmost gravity that in some evil hour 
of enchantment Arthur and two thousand of his 
valiant knights sunk into the abyss of the earth, 
in the midst of their jovial feasting " ; that is, at 
the celebration of some gala day of the Round 
Table. It is added that Arthur himself was spirited 
away to Faerie ; and so we have another of the 
many local legends of " Arthur's Sleep," asso- 
ciated also with Craig-y-Dinas, in the Vale of 
Neath, with a spot in the Black Mountains, near 
Gwynfe, with a mountain in the Bala region of 
North Wales, with a well at Cadbury (Camelot) 
in Somerset, and many other places. 

" He is a king crowned in Faerie," says Lydgate, 
and shall yet resort — 

"... our Lord and sovereigne, 
Out of Faerie and reigne in Brittaine." 



CAERLEON-ON-USK 53 

Any one who cares can go on pilgrimage to the 
city and evoke its ghostly king. " The Usk mur- 
murs by the windows, and I sit like King Arthur 
in Caerleon," says Tennyson, writing from the 
queer old riverside inn, " The Hanbury Arms," 
in September, 1850. There have been some 
changes in what the natives call " Kerleen " 
since then, but its Arthurian tradition has not 
grown less. 



CHAPTER V 

FROM THE USK TO THE TAFF — THE WENTLOOG 
LEVEL — RHYMNEY — FREEMAN THE HISTORIAN 
— AN OLD ROMANCE ROAD AND A PAGE FROM 
THE " MABINOGION " 

The Severn Sea Flats between Newport and 
Cardiff make a no-inan's land, a neglected 
district, commonly travelled only by plain folk, 
hawkers, bakers, and the like, who have busi- 
ness to do. At points it will remind you, if you 
know the east coast, of Canvey Island or parts of 
Mersea. The way to take it is to expect a melan- 
choly region; and then the "rhines" and reedy 
fields and long, monotonous roads will offer enter- 
tainment. A farmstead once a priory, a neglected 
old house with a history, a whitewashed cottage 
between the last field and the sea, which was once 
drowned out in the great flood, or a flood-mark on 
a church wall, stir the conjectural wits of the 
traveller. The sea-walls, maintained at much 
cost to the farmers, show the risk of the Severn 
Sea's yet recapturing Wentloog. This was why 
castles were few along this extent of coast. 

The old lordship of Wentloog stretched from the 
Usk to the Rhymney, and from the Severn to a 
boundary-line drawn from Llantarnam to Risca 
and Michaelston-y-Fedw. No less than seventeen 
manors were parcelled out of it. 

54 






FROM THE USK TO THE TAFF 55 

Cox mentions in the last of these — that is, in the 
level of Mendalgyf — one of the several Green 
Castles that exist in South Wales : Castell Glas, 
on the left bank of the Ebwy, near the confluence 
with the Usk. This is the same " seat " that 
Churchyard describes : — 

" A goodly seate, a tower, a princely pyle 
Built as a watch or saftie for the soil 
By river stands, from Neawport not three myle." 

Now the huge enginery of the docks, far higher 
than any old castle, starts up formidably in the 
scene. Some two miles west of Green Castle 
lies St. Bride Wentloog, and the road thence 
runs a flat two miles further to Peterstone, 
whose Welsh name is Llanbad, short for 
Llanbedr, the church of Pedr or Peter. 

The famous flood-mark at St. Bride's makes 
you realise how amphibious life used to be in 
these marshy levels. Their most tragic tale is 
the "Great Sea Flood" of 1606, chronicled in 
the Harleian Miscellany. It befell on Tuesday, 
the 20th of January, and most idiomatically the 
miscellanist describes it : — 

"For, about nine of the clock in the morning, the same 
being most fayrely and brightly spred, many of the in- 
habitants of those countreys prepared themselves to their 
affayres, then they might see and perceive afar off as it 
were in the element huge and mighty hilles of water 
tombling one over another in such sort as if the greatest 
mountains in the world had overwhelmed the low villages 
and marshy grounds. Sometimes it dazzled many of the 
spectators that they imagined it had bin some fogge or 
miste coming with great swiftness towards them and with 
such a smoke as if mountains were all on fire, and to 
the view of some it seemed as if myllions of thousands of 
arrows had been shot forthe all at one time. 



56 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

"So violent and swifte were the outrageous waves, that 
in less than five hours space most part of those Countreys 
(especially the places that laye lowe) were all overflown, 
and many hundreds of people, both men and women and 
children, were there quite devoured by those outrageous 
waters ; nay, more, the farmers and husbandmen and 
shepheardes might behold their goodly flockes swimming 
upon the waters dead." 

Many kinds of marsh and water-birds, large 
and small, are seen in the Wentloog Level, in- 
cluding herons, grebe, and red divers. In hard 
winters (like that of 1890-1891) the bittern and 
goosander reappear. But the wild swans and 
wild geese that haunted the marshes in large flocks 
ere they were drained are pretty well all gone. 

Originally the Rhymney River was called 
Elarch after these swans, according to Coxe ; 
and he speaks of a tradition that the songs of 
these swans could be heard even in London. It 
is another legend of the solitude crying to the 
town. You may realise it even to-day by 
spending an evening at ebb-tide on the coast 
anywhere near Peterston, and hearing the 
waders and waterchicks whistle plaintively 
across the tidal flats. By association it is a 
mournful sound, suggesting the birds bewitched 
that were once children of men, that still have 
human voices : the birds of Rhianon, the child- 
ren of Ler. The Celtic swan legends reach their 
superlative with the going of Ler to Lake Darva, 
where he is told that his children have been 
drowned. 

There he saw four swans near the lake-side, 
and heard them talking like children together. 
When they saw him, they came out of the 
water, and looked sorrowfully at him with their 



FROM THE USK TO THE TAFF 57 

black eyes and snake-like heads. They told him 
they were bewitched by their step-mother Seife, 
and begged him to break the spell. But it 
was not till the third stage of their existence, 
hundreds of years afterwards, when they were 
in the island of Glora, that the spell was 
broken. They had a friend there, the Lonely 
Crane of Inniskea ; and there St. Caernhoc 
came with the new faith and they were baptized. 
Before we go on to Cardiff, we ought to stop 
at St. Mellon's, if only because the historian 
E. A. Freeman for some years resided in the 
parish, at Lanrhymney Hall, using it as a 
working-centre from which to explore and map 
out locally the history and mediaeval antiquity 
of South Wales. Many delightfully drawn small 
sketches of churches and towers and other old 
buildings from his sketch-books may be seen 
in the volumes of the Cambrian Archaeological 
Society, for which he laboured tirelessly. Of his 
house, Lanrumney or Llanrhymney, he tells us 
that it was once attached to Keynsham Abbey 
in Somersetshire. 

"Parts of the walls are of a thickness which may be of 
any age, but the earliest architectural features — for which 
however the inquirer must do me the honour of a visit 
inside — are of the time of Elizabeth. We have, however, 
little to boast of beyond a respectable ceiling in the 
ground-floor, — and a fine chimney piece upstairs. The 
latter bears date 1587, and is adorned with an elaborate 
shield of arms, in which, being no great herald, I thought 
I recognised all the kingdoms of the earth, at any rate 
France, Castile, and Scotland ; but I have since heard 
that they all represent different bearings of the family 
of Morgan, a branch of whom held the property as late 
as the eighteenth century, since which it has passed 
through various hands." 



58 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

He rejoiced unfeignedly in the Church of St. 
Mellon's, and gave it among all the churches he 
had seen in the south-western corner of Mon- 
mouthshire, forming the Deanery of Newport, 
the first place : — 

"I mean of course," he adds, "after St. Woolos. There 
are some others in its own neighbourhood which contain 
finer work, but it certainly surpasses all in general 
dignity. It is perhaps less strictly designed than some 
others after a special Monmouthshire type, but it exhibits 
the general South Welsh type on a considerable scale, 
and with extreme variety and picturesqueness of outline. 
In fact, like Llandeilo Bertholey in a distant part of 
the country, its outline would rather have suggested 
Pembrokeshire as its locality than any other part of 
Wales or of Britain. The church is large for a Welsh 
parish church, being about a hundred feet long. Indeed 
most of the churches immediately round it are of con- 
siderable size. Several would, I imagine, exceed St. 
Mellon's in mere length, though I fancy the latter 
covers altogether the greatest amount of ground. St. 
Mellon's consists of a long and broad nave, to which is 
attached a disproportionately short and narrow chancel. 
This chancel too has a totally different radius from that 
of the nave, the south walls of the two coinciding, from 
which it follows that their north walls are very far from 
doing so. Again attached to the chancel, is a sort of 
transeptal chapel running north. The result is that the 
chancel and this chapel are entered from the nave by two 
arches, side by side, divided by a pillar ; the southern 
arch, which leads into the real chancel, is, of course, very 
much the larger of the two. The arrangement is, as far 
as I am aware, unique ; and the effect is singular — far 
more singular, I may add, than beautiful. The peculiarity 
lies in the lopsided appearance of the chancel thus set on 
one side the nave, and in the two unequal arches, side by 
side. A nave so broad as to take in both the choir and 
its aisles, and to open into them by a large central arch 
and a smaller one on each side, is a perfectly intelligible 



FROM THE USK TO THE TAFF 59 

arrangement, and one which would be far from unique in 
the South of France. At Orthez, for instance, in the Low 
Pyrenees, it occurs on a large scale. There are also, I 
believe, some similar English examples. But I have not 
seen or heard of any example, British or Continental, 
rivalling the special eccentricity of St. Mellon's. The first 
feeling suggested is that a north arcade has been de- 
stroyed, which certainly has not been the case since the 
erection of the present church. The ground-plan has 
clearly not been altered since the fourteenth century." 

Freeman had Welsh servants at Lanrhymney, 
and, unlike some Welsh parents, was pleased 
that his children should pick up some words of 
the old tongue. Long before you cross the western 
boundary-line of Monmouthshire you are pretty 
sure, if you keep your ears open, of hearing it 
spoken. The particular dialect of Gwent is 
called after it — "y Wenhwyseg," and it is dif- 
ferent enough in many of its idioms and 
pronunciations from the Welsh of the north 
and west. You may suppose that this is because 
Welsh in Monmouthshire is dying out. Not at 
all. Up in the valleys, like the poet Islwyn's, 
at Sirhowy (where I remember his sister, a 
farmer's wife, speaking it with a most attrac- 
tive and pure accent) and in all the western 
stretches it holds its own ; and though Caerleon 
has no Welsh, Newport town prides itself upon 
it, and has a patriotic society and a devoted 
publisher of Welsh books in Mr. Southall, an 
Englishman who has learnt the tongue. The 
small colloquial changes are many and easily 
detected. Take the Welsh for 'I am,' — 
' Ydwyf ' in the book, ' Otw ' in Gwentian 
speech, which points to a tendency all through 
to turn 'd' into *t.' Thus a fox, 'cadno' 



60 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

becomes 'catno,' which led a bold hunting- 
man once to declare that Welsh rustics called 
foxes wild cats. Another change comes of 
softening the ' a ' : a Welsh boy in Gwent 
speaks of a father, ' Tad,' as ' tead.' Then the 
' h ' is often shaky, and it seems only in Gwent 
the English vulgarism of ' awfully ' is accepted 
slang as in the phrase — 'da afnatw!' ('awfully 
good ! '). In his capital little word-book for the 
district the Rev. John Griffith gives many other 
local differences, as the innocent expletive, ' neno 
dyn ' for ' yn yr enw dyn ' — ' in the name of man. 
However, it is by no means here only that the 
initial ' y ' is dropped for convenience in ordinary 
talk. 

I have forgotten in the account of this trans- 
formed countryside the claims of Cefn Mabley, 
so called after Mable, daughter of Fitzhamon. 
This is indeed a superb old house to make a man 
covetous who loves the past as Freeman did. 
There are perhaps twenty seats in this south 
country that one could willingly hold for one's 
own, and be able to have early associations 
with ; and Cefn Mabley not least among them. 
Here lived in the time of the Civil War Sir 
Nicholas Kemeys, a soldier made of indomitable 
stuff, who held Chepstow Castle for the King 
and died rather than surrender it. A descendant 
of his, Colonel Kemeys-Tynte, has published some 
tales of the old house, which help to conjure 
it up, as such mirrors may do, with its soldiers' 
gallery, ball-room and great table long as the 
oak-tree that went to make it. 

Well above Cefn Mabley stands Ruperra, 
another old seat connected with the Morgan 
family. The wooded lawns around it were, in 



FROM THE USK TO THE TAFF 



61 



July, 1GJ5, stirred by the arrival of King Charles 
the First as the guest of Sir Philip Morgan. 
Ruperra is, with some show of tradition at least, 
claimed for an Inigo Jones house. It was 
designed on large lines, with a commanding 
relation to its spacious site. An entry in Richard 
Symonds' Diary of the King's stay in Wales after 
Naseby runs : — 

"Sunday, July 27, 1645. — His Mca tIe lay at Ruperrie, a 
faire seate of Mr. Morgan." 




A WEST MONMOUTHSHIBE COTTAGE. 

This was the time of the King's disheartening 
negotiations with the " Peaceable Army." Next 
day he went on to Cardiff, but returned to Sir 
Philip Morgan's roof and made it his headquarters 
for a day or two longer. While there ill-news 
continued to arrive, and he heard of the burning 
of Abergavenny Castle— or the habitable part of 
it. Intrigues were gathering head against him 



62 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

on every side in South "Wales, and the squires 
were becoming more and more disaffected. The 
Rhymney River makes a true Glamorgan curve 
as it circles to the north of Ruperra. It flows 
on then, serving as the boundary for the two 
shires for over twenty miles of its course to its 
namesake village, and reaches the sea at one end 
of the sea-flat whose other end is now shaped 
and transformed into the Bute Docks — the marsh 
made into a huge geometrically planned har- 
bour. 

Approaching Cardiff from the east — and if by 
one of the higher roads all the better ! — you are 
bound to be set thinking of Geraint and the way 
he took thither from Caerleon. The description 
of the road and his arrival in the town is one of 
the best contrived things, full as it is of the sense 
of greater adventure to come, which is to be had 
in all wayfaring literature. You realise the Car- 
diff of the Mabinogion the better for reading 
it again in that princely old story-book. Let us 
relate the end of the journey to the page for the 
sake of the sheer gust of romance it brings with 
it : it ends for that night, you remember, in the 
upper chamber of the ruined hall of the dis- 
possessed, hoary-headed lord, Enid's father, where 
Geraint first spies the destined maid, Enid. There 
sits the ancient, worn-out dame in tattered, worn- 
out satin, the wreck of beauty ; and beside her 
Enid, in her much-worn vest — "beginning to be 
worn out." It is a piece of real history that 
follows, showing what went on in many a castle 
in the new Normandy of South Wales. 



CHAPTER VI 

OLD AND NEW CARDIFF — THE SEAPORT, THE CITY 
AND THE CASTLE — A RARE CASTLE-BREAKER — 
THE " CUSTOMERS " AND THE SMUGGLERS 

One autumn morning, bound for Cardiff, we sailed 
out from Uphill Bay on the Somerset side, with 
Brean Down on our left, and looked westward 
through the morning haze that lay along the 
Welsh coast opposite. A glimpse of Barry Island 
ought to have been caught presently, almost on a 
line with the lighthouse on Flatholme, as our boat's 
head swerved ; but we were not sure of it. How- 
ever, we knew that within the curved bay behind 
Coldknap Point the tide washed over the vanished 
Castle of Porthkerry ; and the thought of St. Ceri 
and of Penarth, to which our course was set, were 
quite enough to start the spirit of the old sea- 
tales which Somerset and South Wales shared. 
There are one or two vestiges of these in Malory, 
which show how Cardiff counted in the wild 
geography of those tales. Most notable is the 
embarking of Launcelot : — 

"And wholly an hundred knights departed with Sir 
Launcelot at once, and made their avows they would never 
leave him for weal nor for woe. And so they shipped at 
Cardiff, and sailed unto Ben wick ; some men call it Bayonne, 
and some men call it Beaume, where the wine of Beaume i^." 

63 



64 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Following hot upon Launcelot's heels came the 
King himself, who made ready a great host to 
pass over the sea ; and he too shipped at Cardiff. 
Not only that. It was there he took the fatal 
step of making Mordred " chief ruler " during his 
war in France, and put Queen Gwenever under 
the traitor's charge, thus hastening on the doom 
of the realm. 

How inevitably it recalls the Welsh legend of 
the Norman settlement in Glamorgan, as told in 
the country and in the famous old history-book 
by Rice Merrick which is its testament. When 
you have allowed for the shuffling of names and 
places and the telling and retelling of this par- 
ticular episode, you begin to see how it was King 
Arthur went through so many transmogrifications 
— as from a British chief into a Roman Emperor, 
or from a Roman into a Welsh prince. The next 
thing was to Normanise him, and relate him to 
Cardiff, the Normal citadel. Unlike most Welsh 
castles, Cardiff has the sprucer military air of one 
that is used, and lived in, and kept up in state. 
In the midst of modern Cardiff it looks modern, 
and seems to forget the old town which clustered 
around its walls, and took name and fame from 
the citadel on the Taff River. The Caer in the 
name of Cardiff comes from the Castle, and the 
meaning of the " diff " or " dydd " is hardly 
doubtful. The best of local guides gives four- 
teen variations in the spelling of the name, 
including Kardi, Cardivia, Caer Dyf, Kerdiff and 
Cairtaphe. The last mentioned is Leland's read- 
ing of Cardiff, and it may encourage you to arrive 
at the decisive variant — Caerdaff, the Castle of 
Taff, just as Llandaff was the Church of Taff. 

But, standing by Cardiff Castle, do not be 



OLD AND NEW CARDIFF 65 

beguiled by its newer aspect into forgetting the 
secrets that have dropped into its dust. Before 
there was a Norman castle there was a Welsh one, 
and before the Welsh castle there was a Roman, 
and little doubt but that before the Roman there 
was a British caer. Aulus Didius was the first 
Roman to plant the eagle securely at the mouth of 
the Taff ; but he was not by any means the true 
conqueror of the Silures. Ostorius, tired, doffed 
his conqueror's shoes ; and Didius succeeding 
him, only put them on. So some generals win 
with the victories of others. However that may 
be, a segment of the Roman wall has been 
unearthed in its massive entirety on the banks 
of the Taff, and it is to be seen if you walk 
straight across the Castle grounds from the 
entrance. Then, if it is summer, and the trees 
are in leaf, you have left the modern world 
and the ambitious city behind, and are in the 
time and place of Duke Robert, or you are a 
contemporary, if you please, of Aulus and his 
sentinels. There are not many such examples of 
Roman masonry to be had anywhere. The wall 
at this point is some thirteen feet high and seven 
feet thick at half its height ; many of the stones 
are larger than those usually found in Roman 
mason-work, whose size was strictly adapted to the 
capacity of the British shoulders that had to bear 
them. 

One turns here, in a moment, from the Roman 
to the Norman caer. It is the unique effect of 
this Castle to mark the seven ages of Wales in 
its stones. 

Cardiff Castle was the fighting base of the 
Norman conquerors of South Wales. As we said 
before, the story of Fitzhamon and his twelve 

5 



66 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

knights has both stolen things from and lent 
them to romance ; and the traffic their names 
recall between Wales and Normandy explains 
something of the traffic in the Arthurian tales 
that went on betwixt the countries across the 
Channel. The figure of Robert Curthose, Duke 
of Normandy, who spent some twenty-five years 
in Robert's Tower, and died in 1134, starts up, a 
burly shadow, out of the shades. He was a lover 
of minstrelsy while he lived, and took a wise 
interest in the poetry of his enforced country, and 
learned enough of the Welsh tongue to write in 
it. Yes, he wrote a Welsh poem, addressed, as 
Penarth might have reminded us, to a distant 
oak that he saw from his prison window on the 
Head there. Somewhat thus it runs : — 

"Oak that grows on the battle-rood; 
After battle, after blood ; — 
Alas, for the wine that fed the feud ! 

Oak that grows upon the green, 
Where the red blood-drip has been ! 
Alas, for him that hate has seen ! 

Oak that watches from the bluff 

The Severn Sea, — blow fair, blow rough 1 

Alas, for the old, not old enough ! " 

There are more verses, and unluckily for Count 
Robert's fame as a Welsh poet, they are very like 
some older ones addressed to a still older tree. 
But there is the genuine echo of his predicament 
in them, and they help to establish his place as 
a sympathetic merchant dealing in Cardiff's medi- 
aeval literary market, which received legends and 
other Welsh produce — not being at all averse to 
stolen goods — and stamped them with a French 



OLD AND NEW CARDIFF 67 

name for the French market. It reminds me that 
some twenty-five years ago I once drove from 

Court Henri to a farm on the B uplands, where 

they made a most deliciously flavoured creamy 
cheese. When I asked the farmer what he did 
with such a valuable commodity he told me it was 
sent to London, stamped with a Swiss mark, and 
•retailed in Soho and the French mart at a high 
price. 

■ One is liable to get confused between Duke 
Robert of Normandy and Earl Robert of Glou- 
cester, in whose charge he was. The Earl, known 
also as Robert of Caen, was himself a lover of 
poetry and learning, and had his Welsh sympa- 
thies ; and in the Castle here, or another gallery, 
hangs a picture of him, with Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth, Caradoc of Llancarvan, and Walter Map 
gathered about him. Duke Robert's Tower, as it 
is now, has been much altered and added to. The 
late Lord Bute tells us that when Pope Calixtus 
II. met Henry I. at Givors, he remonstrated with 
the King upon his treatment of his brother. 
" Henry replied that ' as for his brother, he had not 
caused him to be bound in fetters like a captive 
enemy, but, treating him like a noble pilgrim worn 
out with long sufferings, had placed him in a Royal 
Castle, and supplied his table and wardrobe with 
all kinds of luxuries and delicacies in great abund- 
ance. In 1134 Robert died at Cardiff, and is 
stated to have been carried to Gloucester, and 
buried with great honours in the pavement of the 
church before the altar." 

The Castle is still haunted by the figure of Duke 
Robert, even while other ghosts are forgotten. 
He may be sketched as he was when he had grown 
stout from want of exercise. " Stout and indolent, 



68 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

pedantic, and self-important," one writer calls him. 
Indolent and weak-willed, he probably was. The 
popular account of his end is like a moving passage 
adapted from an old play : — 

"During his imprisonment, it happened that Henry his 
brother, and then kinge, had brought him, upon a feast daye, 
in the morninge, a scarlet garment to putt on, with a cape for 
the head, as the manor then was, which, as he essayed, he 
found it too straighte in the cape, insonmche that he brake a 
stitche or twoe in the seame, and, castinge it aside, he bad 
his gentleman give it to his brother Robert, for his head 
(quoth he) is less than myne. The garment was brought him, 
and when he sawe it a little torne, he demanded how it hap- 
pened that it was not sewed ; the gentleman told the trouthe, 
which, as he understode, he fell into a great melancholy, 
sayinge, ' And dothe my brother make me his bedeman, in 
that he sendethe me his cast clothes ? Then have I lyved too 
longe I ' and, refusing all sustenance, he died." 

It is the Banqueting Hall, a stately apartment 
wainscoted in walnut, which is frescoed with the 
story of the royal prisoner, Duke Robert. The 
Entrance Hall is connected with the Banqueting 
Hall by the grand staircase, and an octagonal 
staircase connects the latter chamber with the 
Library and the Chapel. The Chapel is, I suppose, 
the most gorgeous religious interior to be seen 
in Wales. Painted marble walls and ceilings, 
enamelled shields, glowing pictures, and an altar 
representing the tomb of the Saviour, give the 
building an excess of splendour. 

The castellan, or as he is called in Malory's 
Morte D Arthur, the Captain of Cardiff, was 
only a casual apparition in Arthurian romance ; 
but the shadow of the Castle and its history and 
traditions slants, and extends its length and exag- 



OLD AND NEW CARDIFF 69 

gerated proportions through many an Arthurian 
page. 

Cardiff Castle, as you now see it, is the master- 
piece of the late Marquess of Bute, who died in 
1900. Mr. B urges, a great designer, was the archi- 
tect to whom the alterations and restorations were 
entrusted ; and to him we owe ~fche ornate Clock 
Tower, the restored curtain wall, and other changes, 
including the clearing away in advance of the old 
walls and houses which blocked the view. The 
panels on either side of the clock-face are adorned 
by statues of Mars and Sol and Jupiter, with the 
signs of the Zodiac under their feet ; the lead roof 
is garnished with strange stars. The Clock Tower 
would make in itself a desirable mansion for a 
Welsh poet of degrees, or an historiographer. 
The summer smoking-room comes at the top of 
all, with a gallery and dome whose panels again 
display starry decorations, while the secrets of 
the Zodiac appear in the painted tiles between the 
windows, and a dado of red marble completes a 
scheme of colour that is half fantastic. The lower, 
or winter, smoking-room is even more gorgeous ; 
and its painted and vaulted ceiling, its painted 
walls, its painted windows, might rather appear 
fitted to indulge the dreams of an opium-smoker 
than humour the plain tobacco-pipe. Sun and 
stars, Thor and Woden, the days of the week, and 
the four seasons of the year are figured there in 
splendour ; and the wood-carving is the work of a 
fine artist, the late Thomas John, father of Mr. 
Goscombe John, A.R.A., the Welsh sculptor. 

Every Welsh Norman castle had its castle- 
breaker. As one walks the green close or the high 
battlements of Cardiff one is haunted by the form 
of Ivor Bach, Ivor the Little, who, little as he was, 



70 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

outdid all other feats of the kind. Only a Dumas 
could do justice to this great-little creature. A 
sort of Dumas we had, a fighting cleric and an 
intermittent romancer, in Gerald de Barri, who did 
write an account of Ivor's capping adventure. 
But he wrote it in earnest, for his own people held 
castles, and he felt the two currents, Welsh and 
Norman, at strife in his own blood, and realised 
that castle-breaking was a very serious business. 

Reading this Ivor episode, you breathe that finer 
element which often gives Welsh history an air 
not quite real, an air of the unconditioned ; for 
here was an all but incredible adventure carried 
through by a real knight for whom restraints did 
not count, who treated castle walls and their 
garrisons and castellans as lightly as Kai treated 
the Castle of Gwrnach the giant in the story 
of Olwen. 

It happened, Gerald de Barri tells us, that 
William, Earl of Gloucester, who besides Cardiff 
Castle held all Morganwg — that is, the old land of 
Glamorgan — quarrelled with this Ivor — " a man of 
small stature but great courage." Ivor owned, 
" Welsh fashion, a large tract of the wooded and 
the wild hill-country ; and this the Earl was minded 
to take from him. Now at that time the Castle of 
Caerdyff was walled by high walls, kept by 120 
men-at-arms, a fine body of archers, and a strong 
watch. Yet, defying them all, Ivor scaled the 
walls at dead of night, seized the Earl and Coun- 
tess and their only son, carried them off, and did 
not let them go again till he got back every- 
thing that had been taken from him — ay, and a 
pretty large slice of land beside." 

Ivor's strong-house was in a notch of the hill, 
probably on a site a little above Lord Bute's reno- 



OLD AND NEW CARDIFF 71 

vated Castell Coch, which again suggests the Red 
Castle of many tales. But the capitol of all these 
castles, Gerald's " Caerdyff " or " Kaerdiva," had its 
revenge on Ivor's stock. In that old budget of 
gossip's history, Rice Merrick's Booke of Glamo7 , ~ 
ganshires Antiquities, already quoted in this 
chapter, you may read that the unfortunate grand- 
children of Griffith ab Ivor, who married a Clare, 
had their eyes put out and were starved to death 
here by Sir Richard de Clare, their kinsman. Only 
one escaped, who was then a babe in his nurse's arms. 
11 Of whom God," says Rice Merrick, " multiplied a 
great people." A remarkable old Welsh family, 
indeed, sprang from Howel's loins. 

When Cardiff's mediaeval romance-episodes were 
over, a hearty era of buccaneering romance set in. 
Then the Knight who was no knight at all in the 
Arthurian sense — that John Knight who dubbed 
himself King of Lundy, and who was tyrant of 
Barry Isle — blackmailed the vessels bound for Car- 
diff and Bristowe, and Porlock and Bridgewater, 
and hid French wines and foreign tobacco in the 
Barry sandhills, and terrorised the Cardiff Custom 
House with an armed brig. 

You must turn to the second volume of the 
Cardiff Records and look up the Custom House 
memoranda for the years 1784 and 1787, if you 
would read of the doings of Knight and his smug- 
glers, said to be at times sixty or seventy strong. 
\On November 18, 1784, the local "Customers" 
report to the London Custom House : " It's with 
great Truth we assure you that the People here 
are in such dread of Knight and his Gang, that we 
found a difficulty in finding People to Work for 
us." In 1787 we hear of the Preventives having 
driven " that notorious Smugler Knight from the 



72 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Island of Barry." It seems that he had transferred 
the base of his operations from Barry to Lundy. 
Thereupon, no doubt, the price of tobacco went up 
in the Cardiff district ; small shops were not so 
mysteriously replenished and fewer pipes exhaled. 
You get but a passing glimpse of Steepholme, 
where one of the early hermits, a contemporary of 
Arthur, had his cell, as you cross the Severn Sea to 
Cardiff. But you can spy it from Penarth, and a 
white sail dipping from a small craft to the south- 
west of it may recall to you that Arthur had a ship 
of his own, called Prydwen — " White-Shape." We 
may cross the track of this vessel again if we 
follow the great boar-hunt of the " Twrch 
Trwyth." But we must leave the sea-track of the 
old legends now, and with it this new great seaport 
which the water outlet and the coal-field together 
have conspired to make a wonder of the world. 
The immensity of the new life of the Welsh capital 
drives the old time out of one's mind alto- 
gether. The city is only half complete as yet ; 
streets and buildings splendid and mean jostle each 
other in its midst ; but everywhere it impresses 
you as alive, ambitious and potential. It will 
be one of the great battle-fields between Capital 
and Labour in the coming struggle of the twen- 
tieth century. It has a superb castle with a great 
tradition and a pedigree older than Norman. It is 
building its University and its civic halls ; and will 
yet, I believe, build its Parliament House. In the 
Cathays Park is the natural site of great buildings ; 
but it is, because of the loose river-gravel, a very 
difficult one to engineer. Still the old Castle was 
built on the brink of the Taff too, and though the 
rock bottom there gave a better foundation, it 
must have needed some care to plan the site. 



CHAPTER VII 

"BRO MOEGANWG," OR "THE VALE OF GLA- 
MORGAN" — THE CASTLE COUNTRY — DINAS 
POWYS AND THE TALE OF THE TWELVE 
KNIGHTS 

1 ' My men, in helm and jesseraunt, 

That hurled the ladder from the wall 
And watched it fall ; 
My towers that heard the trumpet taunt — 
"What dust has closed your long account ? " 

Before we follow the coast-line west of Cardiff 
we ought to make a detour to visit some of the 
castles that carried the great military chain across 
the sea-levels and low country of Glamorgan. 

The tale of the Twelve Knights with many 
mingled associations of Arthur and Charlemagne, 
and its confused picture of many towers and battle- 
ments of castles impossibly crowded together as in 
the red, blue, and gold design of some old illuminated 
script, rise in the scene as one turns west to the 
rich district of " Bro Morganwg." They revive 
in the delightful old Booke of Glamorganshire s 
Antiquities, written by Rice Merrick in 1578, in 
which we view the coming of the Normans 
and the Twelve Knights of Fitzhamon through a 
pleasant haze of real history. From him, too, we 

73 



74 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

get the best idea that is to be had anywhere of the 
natural advantages the Vale of Glamorgan offered 
the castle-builder. Rice Merrick lived at Cottrell, 
and owned part of the manor of St. Nicholas, and 
he was Clerk of the Peace for the county. In 
writing his book he drew upon a Welsh MS. called 
Cutta Kyvarmoydd, dated about 1445, and his 
history has the singular merit that it has the air 
of matter-of-fact and is yet steeped in romance. 

The " Conquest of Glamorgan," as Merrick 
relates its story, is indeed what may be called 
" Folk-tale History." We learn from it first how 
comfortably seated was the Welsh prince who was 
to be thrown out — a detail that adds point to the 
tale of dispossession. This prince, Iestin, had 
" two principall houses or habitacons — Cardiff and 
Dynaspowys," the last so called in honour of his 
first wife, Denys, who came from Powys-land. 
Then Merrick defines the "Yale of Glamorgan" 
and the hill-country above it in his expressive way. 
Speaking of " Bro Morganwg," usually Englished 
as the Vale of Glamorgan, " Bro," he writes, 
" which is as much to say as the lowe country," or 
" the country in the Vale, extendeth from East to 
West about 24 miles ; and in bredth from the 
Severn Sea on the south side to the foot of the 
Hills, 7 miles less or more." Now here was the 
stormy cradle of the Welsh-Norman tradition. 
Again, " This Bro — being the body of Glamorgan, 
was divided into two by the Thaw, and then, by 
the highway — termed the Portway — from Cardiff 
to the western townes." 

Such a region is nothing without its forest. " In 
the west part was a great fforrest called the fforrest 
of Morgan" — the eastern confines, let us inter- 
polate, of Morgan le Fay's country. Then Merrick 



"BRO MORGANWG" 75 

turns to the up-country, or " Blainey." " Blayne," 
he says, "in English we call Montaines — 3 times 
double as much and more as the low country," 
and divided by almost a continual ridge of hills. 
And more particularly it is the " Blaineu," or upland 
district, that breeds heroes. For " as this soyle," 
compared with " the lowe country," is but barren, 
yet in nourishing and bringing upp tall, mighty 
and active men, it always excelled the other." 
And those who by long experience have governed 
both regions, he says, "prescribed this principle 
that the Glamorgan lowlander required a different 
treatment to the highland. " This to be wonne by 
gentlenes, the other [the highlanderj kept under 
with feare." 

One mightily significant thing in the Glamorgan 
romance of the coming of the Normans, as Rice 
ap Merrick tells it, is that the quarrel between 
" Iestin vap Gurgan and Rhys ap Tewdwr " is due 
first of all to the Bayrdd ( " Beirdd " ), or bards. 
Rhys's " beirdd," after a visit to Iestin, tell Rhys 
that Deheubarth and Morganwg want only one 
completing detail — a meet match and mate for 
him. Now this might have been " had he only had 
Iestin's wife, whereby," says Rice Merrick, " Rhys 
was soon kindled with Venus' dart." Here is a 
perfect romance opening. In his ardour, Rhys 
arranges a high feast at Neath, " with a great 
trayne of Gentlemen and women." It is but 
natural that war should follow. And then it is 
that Iestin appeals for aid outside the Welsh 
borders, and procures Fitzhamon, who brings an 
army ranged under twelve knights — "valiant 
men well practiced in the feates of Chevallry." 
In the issue, Rhys is overthrown and slain ; and 
it is not long ere the Normans take occasion to 



76 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

kill Iestin, who has not kept faith " on Inon's 
recall." 

But the " Bro " is still the charm that acts upon 
those superb land-thieves, the Normans. In 
passing through Glamorgan, says Merrick — 

"the plesant (nature) of the soyle, which abounded with 
wyde ffeildes — pastures, deep Moores, sweete Meadowes, 
goodly Rivers, wholsonie Springe, great shadowing woodes — 
soe pleased and delighted the eyes of Sir Robert Fittshamon 
and his 'complices, that they coveted the plant themselves 
and to make Seates for them and their posterity therein, 
according to the Poet, 

" 'ffor now that Soyle contents mee more 
Than all my Country vayn.' " 

He tells, too, how on their fatal recall, when 
they were leaving this land of promise, " Einon 
overtook them at Pwll Myryg about a mile distant 
by West Chepstowe." But prior to this the 
promised reward, or " Sallary," was paid at "Golden 
Mile," which is between Cowbridge and Ewenny. 

This is the list of the twelve knights, whose 
names are redolent of romance 

1. Sir Wm. de Londres (Ogmore). 

2. Sir Rich, de Granvilla (Neath). 

3. Sir Pagan, alias Payn Turbervile (Coyty). 

4. Sir Robt. of Sainct Quintin (Llanblethyan). 

5. Sir Rich. Seward (Talavan — Seward's Land). 

6. Sir Gilbert Humfreyvyle (Penmarck). 

7. Sir Raynould de Sully (Sully). 

8. Sir Roger Berkrols (East Orchard). 

9. Sir Peter le Soore (St. Ffagan's and Peterson). 

10. Sir John Flemynge (Wenvoe, Lamays, Flemingston). 

11. Sir Olliver St. John (Foonmoonn). 

12. Sir Wm. le Esterlinge (St. Donette's). 

Of the castles whose names we may recognise in 



"BRO MORGANWG" 77 

those that are bracketed after the twelve knights' 
names, several lie within easy hail of Cardiff. St. 
Fagan's, now Lord Windsor's seat, is only three 
miles to the north-west ; Fonmon is about ten 
miles south-west : Wenvoe, six miles south-west ; 
and Sully on the coast about two leagues south, 
near Sully Island (where was an older Danish 
sea-castle or fort). 

But, before any, in order of time and of the 
great Glamorgan legend, as Rice Merrick paints it, 
we ought to turn to Dinas Powys — the seat of 
Iestin and Denys, his wife. 

Dinas Powys lies in that region of pretty 
country which, being within easy distance of Cardiff 
and Penarth, is being gradually overbuilt and 
spoilt. Dinas Powys, approached from the 
Cadoxton road, and seen above its green cwm, 
makes an effect that one does not soon forget. 
The interior of the Castle is used now as a garden 
by its owner, and castle-hunters are not encouraged 
to invade it ; but the approach from the highway 
below is alluring. A strategic view can be had of 
its walls from the slope of the dingle, near Dinas 
Farm, and then the ancient stones and strength of 
the place are plainly seen. Posted there, on its 
limestone base, it perfectly commands the cwm 
(through which, no doubt, ran one of the Welsh 
green roads that threaded the district). Thus it 
served as a key to a dangerous door. The next 
castle to Dinas Powys, on the west, is Wenvoe ; 
and Wenvoe was within easy call of the fighting 
monks of Llancarvan. Beili Castle, on the north 
of Dinas Powys, and Sully and Barry on the south, 
tell us, for the twentieth time, how ringed about 
with fortresses and strong-houses was the whole 
castlery of Cardiff. 



78 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Dinas Powys tradition, further complicating Rice 
Merrick's and other mixed tales about Iestyn ap 
Gwrgant, tells how (as a wedding present for his 
young wife, Denys, a Powys princess) he built this 
Castle before the Normans came by his disastrous 
invitation ; and how, in spite of their coming, his 
surviving five sons, born and bred in this Castle, 
founded five great old families, all bearing the same 
arms. Now, the arms of Iestyn are " gules, three 
chevronels in pale, argent." If you are anything 
of a pedigree man, you will see the importance of 
this reminder. As for Iestyn, you will remember 
how, by the common tradition, he died no farther 
away than " Mynydd Bychan," or the Heath, as it 
is now called. So says one story. Another swears 
he died at Llangennys Monastery, having, like 
Llywarch Hen, survived all his sons. But one 
thing has still to be said about Iestyn's wife, 
Denys : the chroniclers declare she gave her name, 
as would be very natural, to the Castle, which 
would become Denys Powys. Mr. Thomas Morgan, 
a good local authority, in his Glamorganshire 
Place Names, appears to accept this notion. But 
one cannot help suspecting that Dinas Powys was 
a British camp before Iestyn touched the site, and 
that there was a " dinas," or old British habitation, 
here for centuries before Denys came from Powys. 

It would be hard to find a countryside richer than 
the Vale of Glamorgan in the half-buried debris 
of real history, tradition, and superstition, dreadful 
and beautiful. Earliest of all, there lives an echo 
of Druid terror about the standing stones. What 
but a maenhir would go down and dip in the sea 
on Christmas night? There are Druid stones at 
Duffryn, near St. Nicholas ; the field where they 
stand is supposed to be under a curse. Nothing 



"BRO MORGANWG" 79 

will grow there. Once a year the stones rise up, 
on Midsummer Eve, and whirl round three times. 
Any one who sleeps in the great cromlech in the 
Duffryn Woods on one of the three spirit nights 
will go raving mad. Only once a year does the sun 
dance ; if you will only get up early enough on 
Easter Monday morning you will see it. 

More perishable than the British superstition, 
the Roman seems to have faded out completely, 
unless, as is possible, some of the treasure-stories 
date from Roman days. There is often a tale of a 
grey lady, or a white lady, or even of a black lady, 
connected with the finding of a buried hoard. 
Sometimes they are manifestly the ghost of some 
memory of deadly terror, slow to die out, 
connected for hundreds of years with the same 
spot. 

Phantom funerals still pass along the roads of 
the valley. A man riding home from market may 
even be so unfortunate as to see his own funeral 
moving in ghostly procession, and then go home to 
die. In Miss Marie Trevelyan's Llantwit collection 
of Welsh folk-lore a story is given of a phantom 
horse, the property of an old house in Glamorgan. 

A few years ago an English wanderer in 
Glamorgan asked to be allowed to see the interior 
of the house. After spending an idle hour in the 
house, he. left, and while going down the drive 
saw a white horse cantering towards him. It was a 
beautiful animal with a splendid white mane and 
long, flowing tail. The stranger stood aside and 
the horse passed, going straight up to the great 
entrance of the hall. The visitor thought no more 
of the horse until he sat at supper in a small 
country inn in the neighbourhood. There he hap- 
pened to say to the innkeeper what a fine white 



80 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

horse he had seen in the manor-drive — a horse that 
he was fairly sure was an Arab. He explained that 
the Arab was riderless. The landlord asked if any 
groom or man was with it, and the stranger said it 
was alone. For a moment or two the other looked 
troubled, and then in a whisper said, " If you 
please, sir, do not mention this in the village, because 
it is a token of death in the manor-house family." 
The visitor remained, it is added, in the neighbour- 
hood long enough to hear that one of the sons of 
the manor-house had just died in India. 

If you have a gift that way, you may chance to 
see not only a death-horse in the Vale of Glamor- 
gan, but water-horses, too. There is one that rolls 
and plunges in the edges of the sea-waves when a 
storm is coming on. There is another that comes 
up, all dripping, out of the streams and frightens 
the lonely shepherd boy or girl. 

There are other queer creatures you had better 
not meet : snakes that have underground treasures 
to guard, corpse-lights moving where no light should 
be, funeral-dogs, and cunning old reprobate grizzled 
foxes that have lived far too long and seen far too 
much. Worst of all, there are wicked, grey-headed 
hares that it is not at all safe to meddle with. 

There are wise-men and wise-women still that it 
is not safe to meddle with either ; a tradition of 
the old half- magical practice of medicine still sur- 
vives. We are wise enough now to admit the exist- 
ence of certain powerful individualities, natural 
healers gifted with magnetic force, and to believe 
in the sympathetic power of the will, and to recog- 
nise that those healers at times got hold of some- 
thing that our hospitals cannot teach. Personally, 
I have known remarkable instances of cures, 
especially of hydrophobia, by very extraordinary 



s 



. 




"AX UNCONSCIOUS FOLK-LOKIST": VALE OF GLAMORGAN. 
Drawing by Mr. T. H. Thomas. 



To face p. 80. 



"BRO MORGANWG" 81 

practitioners indeed. An old country doctor said 
to a friend, " If ever I were bitten by a mad dog I 
should not dream of going to Pasteur. I should go 

straight to " (mentioning a local wizard). " He 

cured thirty of the worst cases I have seen in this 
district." 

A famous local habitation of these half-magical 
practices is the rag-well. There is one near 
Bridgend and another at Marcross, near Nash Point. 
There is nearly always the same favouring scene : 
the shut-in landscape, the small well, the conscious 
thorn-bush fluttering with rags. The ancient prac- 
tice of these rag- wells has become obscured. Origi- 
nally the suffering pilgrim stood within the water 
of the well, bathed the eyes or other affected part 
(Marcross is a powerful eye-well), hung the bandage 
used upon the thorn and dropped a small coin (in 
later days a pin) into the well as an offering to the 
presiding spirit of the place. The rag placed on the 
thorn was regarded as a vehicle of disease, not as 
an offering ; the visitor to the well hoped to leave 
his or her ailment hanging on the thorn. The 
modern man, looking at the ancient bush with its 
fluttering or lazily hanging burden, does not know 
whether to be more impressed by the thorn as a 
nursery for microbes or as a symbol of the faith 
that moves mountains, operative through thousands 
of years. 



CHAPTER VIII 

PENARTH HEAD — THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE 
COAST — DOCKS AND A PICTURE-GALLERY — SULLY 
ISLAND AND THE TWO HOLMS 

Westward of the Taff the coast changes, and 
begins to show signs of a bolder sea-front befitting 
the wider sea that now opens before it. Penarth 
Head marks the difference well with its Rhaetic 
cliff, 100 feet high, capped by Lias and based on 
Keuper Marl, which, by the way, is one of the finest 
fossil-beds in the country. A remarkable piece of 
rock architecture, this parti-coloured cliff with its 
fossil fish-scales, teeth, bones and lignite, stands up 
a plain witness of the changes that have passed 
over the coast-line of Morganwg. The Rhsetic 
strata here are known as the " Penarth Beds," 
the name Murchison gave them. At the Cardiff 
Museum lies a good store of the fossils obtained from 
them by the late John Storrie, a born naturalist, 
formerly curator there. You see there bones and 
backbones of the great saurians, with perfect teeth 
of Ceratodus, teeth of Sargodon, along with tell- 
tale water-worn fragments of lignite, left by the 
old forests that grew here before the first stone- 
men had sharpened their stone-axes to cut down 
a tree. 

Turn from these details of the slow building of 

82 



PENARTH HEAD 83 

the coast by earth and sea to the newly architec- 
tured basins of the great docks. The cliff of 
Penarth, the Bear's Head, forms the protecting 
shoulder of the great dock there ensconced ; and 
presently at Barry you will see how (as Mr. T. H. 
Thomas puts it) " the erosion of the softer Lias by 
the sea, and a small stream on either side of a mass 
of mountain limestone supporting Trias beds, have 
formed a waterway which has been trimmed into 
a dock larger in area than any other in England." 

Penarth Head makes the approach to the water- 
ing-place below a trifle eccentric in its ups and 
downs. But the hilly streets, once Penarth proper 
is reached, give variety to the place, and increase the 
sensation of the bicyclist when, having laboriously 
surmounted the long ascent of the Windsor Road, 
he lets himself go on the corresponding decline 
seawards and arrives incontinently on the Espla- 
nade. These are risks no Fitzhamon ever ran. 
For the rest, the pier, the superb seascape from the 
Head, the Windsor Gardens and their toy trees 
and other pleasures, need not be rediscovered here. 
Penarth Dock is another matter; it captures the 
imagination by its bold bid at sea economy, its 
water-gates that swallow the tides. The " Head " 
provides the Dock, as we see, a shelter by its great 
wind-breaking natural rampart, much as Barry 
Island serves Barry Docks. Nature can be a rare 
carpenter ; and the rocky structure of the Head and 
the coast beyond it prove her a master-mason too. 

On a clear day the view from Penarth Head, 
which is 207 feet above the sea, swallows up half 
the Bristol Channel and its coast-line. From the 
smoke of Bristol, seen beyond Clevedon ; from 
Portishead to Weston, whose lights as they begin 
to gleam look like watch-stars at twilight from this 



84 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

point, with the lighthouse on Flatholm shining a 
little to the south ; from Brean Down over Bridge- 
water Bay the range is wide, but it is cut off west- 
ward from the view of the Quantocks possessed by 
Lavernock Point. 

The new Church of St. Augustine, built in 1895, 
stands well on the landward slope within a stone's 
throw of the Head, and near by is a schoolhouse, 
with a coloured fresco of boys and girls at play 
exhibited on its front. 

Penarth Dock needs an engineer to appreciate all 
the science expended on its construction and its 
adaptation to the tides of the Severn Sea. Penarth 
Head, as we said, serves the Dock here very much 
as Barry Island serves Barry Docks. Allowing for 
the outflow of the river Ely at Penarth, the lot of 
the two places is very similar. Over half a mile 
long, the Dock and its great basin have a water 
area, of twenty-six acres. The width of the sea- 
gates is thirty yards, and the depth of water at the 
common spring tides six fathoms. Many of the 
largest vessels afloat, laden to their utmost capacity, 
have arrived at and sailed from Penarth Dock with- 
out delay and with perfect safety. The Dock gates 
and bridges are opened and closed by hydraulic 
power, and eight powerful capstans are provided at 
the outer and inner gates for the vessels passing in 
and out. The whole is leased to the Taff Vale Rail- 
way Company for a term of 999 years. What will 
be the state of the congeries of ports and boroughs 
that form the Cardiff district ten centuries hence ? 

The place is fortunate in having, besides its 
docks and the usual seaside distractions, an un- 
expected, delightfully appointed little picture- 
gallery at Turner House. It was given to Penarth 
by the late Mr. Pyke Thompson, who had formed 



PENARTH HEAD 85 

the collection originally for his own pleasure. His 
idea was to form a gallery mainly of British 
painters, which should be small, choice and com- 
plete in itself, and so finely arranged that every 
picture should be given wall-space and light 
sufficient to individualise it. The gallery is 
interesting to amateurs and hunters of the pic- 
turesque in South Wales because of the Welsh 
scenes on the walls. Among these may be noted 
the view of Penarth Point in the lobby, and the 
picture of Swansea Bay by Penry Williams. In 
the main gallery upstairs there are pictures of 
Ludlow Castle, Harlech Castle and Dryslwyn Castle 
by David Cox. There are two exquisite little 
Boningtons too in the upstairs-room, which carry 
us to English places : and a few well-chosen Meryon 
etchings to recall French art, including some in 
fine state of the Notre-Dame series. The gallery, 
small as it is, and partly because it is small, 
makes an unusually complete impression on the 
sense of the man who, tired of the villas and 
seaside frippery of the place, retreats within its 
shelter ; and Penarth may well be proud of Turner 
House and grateful to its giver, who, wise man, 
stipulated as a condition of the bequest that it 
should be open on Sundays. 

Returning to the coast, we ought to note that 
the Penarth Beds, including the Upper and White 
Lias and the Lower, or Black, Lias, provide good 
sport in the way of pectens and other remains. 
And it is not only the Lias that is well placed for 
fossil-hunting between Penarth and Lavernock. 
Along the same range of cliffs may be seen 
beneath the Lias at two places, nearing Laver- 
nock, the New Red and so-called " Tea-green " 
Marls, whose name helps to describe them. The 



86 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Marls, red and green, may be examined, too, on 
Sully and Barry Islands, where the rock serves. 
The best hunting of all is to be had, as a local 
collector has told us, at Lavernock Point itself. 
There is a particular " patchy bed much worn 
and torn by water," made up of jasper and quartz 
and pebbles and nodules and other stony things, 
from which you may dig out bones of two kinds 
of Plesiosaurus, and relics of that extravagant 
monster Ichthyosaurus, and spines of Hybodus. 
These may tell you what saurians, sea-gods, and 
little fishes once knew Lavernock and all this 
corner of the Welsh coast. 

As you walk round the coast from Lavernock 
you pass the island of Sully. Unluckily the coast 
walk is here and there interrupted by private 
grounds ; and low tide does not much better the 
adventure, as the beach can only be followed with 
difficulty, the way being rough and rather un- 
pleasant. At Sully a keen naturalist and observer, 
the late Dean Conybeare (Dean of Llandaff, where 
he lies buried), was for a long time rector. Barry 
Island is, we should add, still ecclesiastically a 
part of the parish of Sully, whose church, much 
restored, has an old piscina to show and three 
tombs on the right of the chancel to the Thomases 
of Llwyn Madoc. A scant fragment of the Castle 
of Sully is all that is now left. Sully Sound 
reached, the rocks must be crossed at low water 
if the island is to be explored. There is a pool 
at the westerly end ; and near the last point are 
the remains of a Danish fort, with a burial mound 
to the right of it. From Swanbridge the cliffs 
westward can be followed toward Barry. 

The Welsh name for Sully — that is, the village — 
is Abersili, because Nant Sili flows out to the sea 



PENARTH HEAD 87 

here. Sully, so declares local gossip, is an English 
version of " Sili," a Welsh term for trickling, or, 
rather, spurting and hissing, water ; and there is 
also a Norse explanation (natural enough, seeing 
that there is the Danish camp to suggest it) which 
declares that Sully means " the ploughed island." 
But Sully was the name, too, of the Norman 
knight who settled here on Fitzhamon's allotment 
of Glamorganshire ; so you can take your choice 
of the three. Swanbridge, like Swansea, may have 
been called after Sweyn, the great Danish sea- 
rover, who perished in 877. 

You may think that the building of the huge 
docks at this corner of the Glamorgan seafront 
and the deepening of the sea-approaches were 
bound more or less to alter the old conditions 
of navigation. But if you talk to a seaman who 
intimately knows the Bristol Channel and its 
shoals and tides, you will find it has not quite 
lost its old tricks. He can tell you about the 
islands and covered rocks ; not so much about 
Sully and Barry Islands perhaps, but Flatholm, 
Steepholm and Lundy too. Walking the fore- 
shore, he still looks at everything from the 
mariner's point of view. He remembers well 
a coarse night on the Welsh Grounds, " thirty 
years ago, last March," when his vessel was all 
but bumped to pieces. The Welsh Grounds, it 
should be said, stretch roughly from about Sud- 
brooke Chapel to the mouth of the Usk. They 
are nearly all uncovered at low water after a 
spring tide. The south-west spit of these sands 
is a particularly nasty one, for the flood-tide 
sweeps over it into Newport deep at a great 
pace. At high water smaller vessels sail over the 
Grounds, but woe to the ship of any deeper 



88 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

draught that gets on to them on a dirty night 
The Cardiff Grounds, again, make a long narrow 
shoal, which is changing all the while. When 
you spy Lavernock Point from the sea, you see 
it as a sort of elbow in the shore-line, and a 
white church or chapel and a farmhouse just 
over the brink of the bold cliff. Steepholm Island 
makes a break in the Channel out of proportion 
to its size on the chart, because of its high, steep 
shore east and west. The island rises at one pitch 
237 feet above sea-level. It has a sly, two-and-a- 
half fathom shelf running out to four cables too, 
which has to be avoided. Flatholm lies about a 
league nearer the Welsh coast ; it too has a light- 
house with red and white occulting lights. The 
" Wolves," which lie eight cables north-west of 
Flatholm, are to Cardiff vessels more dangerous 
than either of the Holms : they are three rocky 
heads, the most wolvish of which sticks a five-v 
foot-long snout out of the water at low tide. 
Two buoys, black and white and red and white, 
mark them. 



CHAPTER IX 

BARRY ISLAND — PORTHKERRY AND KERl'S DAUGH- 
TER — FONTYGARRY AND ABERTHAW 

To Sully succeeds Barry Island, which you can 
easily reach by the Barry Railway without wan- 
dering thither via the coast-line and the cliffs 
of Lavernock and the sea-waste beyond. Barry 
would be very much like a second Penarth, because 
of its mixture of titanic docks and suburban villas, 
were it not for the island, once a sandy solitude 
and pirates' run, now in process of being tamed by 
the house-builder and his brick-terraces. The miles 
of streets and houses, scattered apparently at ran- 
dom on the road from Cardiff, have pushed their 
way now upon the island itself: Cadoxton merges 
itself in Barry Dock, and Barry Dock in Barry 
town, while the island serves all three places as a 
kind of sea-suburb. Once this was all a wild 
warren, with here and there a farm or a few 
cottages, and with more rabbits than men for 
tenantry. The rabbits one mostly sees now are 
those hung up by the heels at the poulterers' 
in Barry streets. As for the harbour, it is claimed 
by its engineers that it is the finest of all the big 
Severn Sea series. It lies under the land, well 
sheltered from all westerly and south-westerly 
winds. The breakwaters completely cover the only 



90 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

points of exposure, say to the southward, with a 
sea range of fourteen miles, and to the south-east 
with a sea range of sixteen miles. The Docks thus 
have their entrance in a well-guarded position ; a 
ship leaving them is in a few minutes in what sailors 
call " blue water," and is not exposed to the trouble- 
some navigation which at Cardiff and Penarth is 
conducted for from two to three miles through 
an artificial channel (cut through the mud flats), 
which channel is nearly dry at low water. There 
is good anchorage ground extending from Barry 
Island to Sully Island, three miles to the eastward. 

One of the Docks looks almost a mile long with a 
width proportionate — a titanic thing. It is ap- 
proached by a passage closed by a caisson, and at 
its east end are two huge Timber Ponds with a 
railway alongside, so that timber can be loaded 
direct from the ponds into the railway wagons. 

The waterway between the breakwater heads 
is over a hundred yards wide, and the Channel is 
lighted after dark by a flashing white light of the 
fifth order, in a trim lighthouse ; the space inside 
the breakwaters affords shelter for pilot-boats, 
tugs, and small craft attendant upon the Docks. 
Barry is the only port in the British Channel 
which vessels can use freely, coming and going 
at any state of the tide. The great wrought-iron 
water-gates at the outer, and Dock, passages are 
moved by great hydraulic rams, strong enough to 
hold the gates rigid while opening and closing. 

Barry Island was formerly a notorious haunt of 
" runners " and smugglers ; and many tales could be 
told of the days, well over a hundred years ago, 
when the island was described as " the Fortress of 
Knight, the Notorious Smugler." Some idea of it, 
and of Knight and his doings, may be had from 



BARRY ISLAND 91 

the Cardiff Custom House papers, which Mr. 
Hobson Mathews ransacked for his second volume 
of the Cardiff Records. There we read how " the 
desperate Ruffins at Barry Island " had a vessel 
with the name John of Combe painted on her 
stern. And in 1784, on April 3rd, we hear of Thomas 
Knight's running successfully a cargo of wine, by 
persuading the tide-waiters and excisemen that it 
was to remain on the island, and then spiriting 
it away — no doubt to supply Cardiff and its cus- 
tomers. However, the Custom House officers made 
Barry Island too hot for Knight ; for in 1785 he 
had retired to Lundy, after having been driven 
from Barry. His " armed brig," it is added, being 
no longer at hand to support the smugglers, their 
ill-trade has much declined. " When his armed 
vessel was there, he was in such Force that it was 
impossible to approach the Island." In 1798, we 
are told of a large take of brandy and port wine 
again on Barry Island. The smugglers found the 
island very well arranged for their favourite game 
of hide-and-seek with the excisemen. " At Barry, 
'tis the same case ; if they find the officer on the 
Island, they'll land the other side of the Harbour,' 
or vice versa, in which case " the officers can't get 
over till the tide is out, which may be 5 or 6 
hours ; and there is so much cover on the Iseland, 
and such conveniencys for hiding of goods, that an 
officer has but a poor chance to meet with 'em after 
they are landed." 

But Barry was an Isle of the Saints, long before 
it was adopted by the Severn sea-rovers of a later 
day. If on reaching the island you turn up the 
new thoroughfare of Newell Street, leaving a few 
shops in a terrace and a new chapel, on the right, 
you soon reach, on the left, the railway and the old 



92 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

walls that mark the site of St. Baruch's Chapel, now 
carefully preserved. All that is to be seen of it, as 
it lies rather below the level of the road, can be 
seen very well through the fence. 

In Rees's Lives of the Cambro-British Saints 
we read that St. Cadoc lived in two islands, Barreu 
and Echni — the latter being no doubt Flat Holme ; 
and there is a strange story of his crossing by boat 
between the two, with two of his disciples — one of 
whom was Baruc. But these two, unluckily, forgot 
to bring Cadoc's Enchiridion with them from 
Echni, and he sent them back, and on the second 
crossing they were drowned — Cadoc seeing the 
disaster from the high ground on Barry Isle. The 
body of Baruc, being recovered, was buried on the 
island : it may have been one of the innumerable 
dead interred near his chapel. The miraculous 
element in the tale is supplied by the catching of a 
salmon, to appease Cadoc's hunger after long 
fasting, and the finding of the lost Enchiridion in 
the fish's belly. 

Gerald de Barri tells us the island was called 
after St. Baruch, and he was buried in " a chapel 
covered with ivy." The De Barris, he adds, took 
their name from the island — a manifest old family 
fiction. St. Baruch has been placed in various 
centuries: he belonged to the sixth. Before him 
we have Peiro, who was a pietist, but hardly pious : 
and then Samson, of Llantwit Major fame : both as 
residents in the religious settlement. Trenches cut 
in exploring St. Baruch's Chapel showed that the 
burials under and around it had been on an extra- 
ordinary scale. Like Bardsey, it seems to have 
been a holy island ; and the bodies of the elect were 
exhumed and brought here from afar. 
The one guide to Barry Island, who knew every 



BARRY ISLAND 93 

nook and corner of it, unearthed its fragments of 
antiquity and thoroughly explored its rocks and 
plants, was the late John Storrie, the naturalist. 
He loved the wild place and its wild flowers, and 
collected over three hundred kinds in all, and he 
put them all, and much more, into his knowledge- 
able small book about the island. Many flowers 
remain in spite of the Docks and the building over 
of the nooks where once grew the milk-vetch, 
the true marshmallow, the henbane, and their 
congeners. 

There is a gently-sloping, smooth-sanded bathing 
beach at Barry Island, in the curve of Whitmore 
(or Wick More) Bay. Round the rocks of Friars 
Point — the point which forms the right-hand or 
western horn of the Bay — is the famous Pebble 
Beach which lined the eastern shore of Barry 
Harbour, as it used to be : a harbour which did not 
collect much shipping beyond a stray ketch or so. 
The " harbour" is now a blind one, ending in the 
embankment across which the western road to the 
island runs. The opposite head, to the west, across 
the harbour mouth, is Coldknap Point. Looking 
west from the Point, you have one of the drowned 
places of the Welsh coast within reach. For there 
stood once the strong tower and water-gate of 
Porthkerry Castle, some of whose foundation walls 
could still be traced at low tide a generation ago. 
At Coldknap Point you can see, whether the tide is 
in or out, the still older walls which form this part 
of the coast, and which are here formed of protru- 
ding buttresses, built of carboniferous limestone, 
above the ramparts of the Lias. 

One of the most inviting sylvan roads in all 
Glamorganshire is that leading down to Porthkerry 
Park. When you have escaped on the brow of the 



94 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

hill the last Barry villas, you soon pass the old 
farmstead of Castle Farm, with the adjacent 
remains of the gateway to show the fine outlook 
seaward of the ancient Castle of Barry. There- 
away the road bends northward, and, reaching the 
brink of Cwm Barry, descends the wooded slopes 
of Coed yr Odyn, amid a scene that might be miles 
from any street or town, and leagues away from 
the sea. The change from the suburban terraces 
of Barry to this unspoilt wooded cwm is sudden and 
delightful. And there is nothing to break the illu- 
sion on the way to Porthkerry, through the Park, 
until one comes to the tall viaduct of the railway 
under which one must pass on the way. The lower 
park-lands, set with fine timber in a green amphi- 
theatre, make (or still made when I last saw them) 
one of the fairest woodland scenes imaginable. 
Leaving the Park, the road, or lane (for it is no 
more), climbs again the western side of the cwm, 
and meets another road at an old thatched home- 
stead, with beehives in the garden and an orchard 
flanking the house. The road to Porthkerry Church 
and the sea lies then on the left ; but you must not 
expect a seaport now at Porthkerry ; for its few 
houses are scattered and you are apt to find your- 
self at last on the way to Rhoose, while still looking 
for an imaginary Porthkerry street and its shops. 

Porthkerry was one of the old legendary 
harbours of South Wales and a momentous spot 
in the records of the Coming of the Normans. 
Here Fitzhamon and his men apparently landed 
in 1093. The curious account given of it by 
Rice Merrick in his Booke of Antiquities has 
been quoted in an earlier page. We might do 
worse than spend an afternoon here, fresh from 
Barry Dock, trying to reconstruct the rude sea- 



BARRY ISLAND 95 

fortress and old Caer of Portbkerry before the 
Normans' time, for one would give much to see a 
real Welsh port of the tenth or eleventh century. 
You cannot but notice at once that the wooded 
confines of Porthkerry and Coed yr Odyn offered 
a campus and mustering-place in which to form 
the newly landed Normans, and arrange plans 
for the surprise of the forces of Rhys. Porth- 
kerry takes its name from Ceri, or St. Curig, 
around whose history, first as a soldier, then as 
a saint, some wild legends have been woven. 
Curig Lwyd, sometimes called Curig the Knight, 
figures in many Welsh traditions. Capel Curig 
in Snowdon and Llangurig are his best-known 
church-dedications in Wales, and he had several 
in Brittany. As for Porthkerry, the Iolo MSS. 
(not always the best authority) say, " St. Cirig 
founded Porthcirig for the benefit of the souls 
of sailors and as a port for them." Another 
document makes Ceri ab Caid its real founder. 
A ballad-writer has laid the scene here, and in 
the neighbouring Glamorgan hill and valley lands, 
of the nightly rides of Ceri ab Caid's daughter, 
who was mysterious in her flight like " Mallt y 
Nos," first cousin of the moth. The ballad, what- 
ever its foundation in folk-lore, gains in reality 
by being read at Porthkerry and related to the 
hills of Morganwg. 

KERFS DAUGHTER. 

i. 

Alone I go a-hunting, when all their hunting's done, 
To follow Keri's daughter in the footsteps of the sun. 
She drowses all the day thro', she wakens with the moth ; 
And shakes out her black tresses from their crimson bind- 
ing cloth. 



96 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Their beauty that she braided falls loose now to her knees, 
As she goes to her window, and wonders at the trees. 
Her eyes shine in the shadow, grown opal-like, and change 
Like pools that fill with starlight when other lights grow 

strange. 
Now on the stair, bare-footed, she stays to gird her gown, 
That it may let the briers be ; — and lightly she goes down. 
What fate's on Keri's daughter, to wake when all is done, 
And follow where the sun went but never see the sun ? 
What fate's on me to follow along the fields of night, 
The feet of Keri's daughter, yet never cross her sight ? 

ii. 

The wind is her white brachet, to course the wood with her. 
Where the oak trees are tall, and the lone stars lean near. 
The oak leaves cannot keep her, her white hound draws 

her on : 
The livelong night, they range the night, until the night 

is done. 
I ride into the mid-wood, and wait. What fragrance 

clings 
Upon the dreaming fernleaf, and the muffled, drowsy things. 
Is that an owl upon the hill, or is it her white hound, 
To tell me I must leave the wood, and follow at the 

sound ? 
But when we reach the hilltop, we hear them in the wood ; 
And when we turn, we turn too late, the moorland is her 

mood.* 

The Barry Railway has a station at Rhoose, 
which, after the fashion of places newly visited 
by a railway, shows signs of growing out of a 
sleepy hamlet and building houses and hotels 
to attract the crowd. The nearest sands are at 
Fontygarry, and the station lies between. As one 
passes through the village, one catches sight of 
an apparent old market cross on a stone-stepped 

* For the continuing stanzas, see Lays of the Bound 
Table, 1905. 



BARRY ISLAND 97 

base ; but it proves, on a nearer approach, to 
be the village pump. The name of Rhoose is 
simply the Welsh Rhos — a marsh meadow, 
which figures so often in Welsh place-names. 
The wreckers of Rhoose were notorious in the 
eighteenth century, and watched the coast like 
hawks from Barry to Dunraven, using false lights 
to lure on any unlucky craft that happened to 
be out of its bearings. They kept up a brisk 
smuggling trade, too, with the coast of France. 
In George the Second's reign detachments of 
soldiers were sent secretly and landed at Barry 
and Aberthaw, at the request of the then Master 
of Fonmon, to try and take the ringleaders of 
the smuggling and wrecking gang. 

From Rhoose it is but a short mile to Fonty- 
garry. The farmhouse of Fontygarry, greenly 
embowered, is reached in a dip of the road on the 
right ; a house where John Wesley once made 
a stay on his Welsh journeys. 

From Fontygarry to Aberthaw is another mile 
and a half. Aberthaw, once a well-known little 
seaport, still keeps much of the good old style 
of the genuine Glamorgan village about it, with 
thatched roofs and thick-walled cottages. The 
river has become sanded up to an impracticable 
extent for shipping now, and only a few stray 
ketches and small vessels put into the port. 
Formerly it was a favourite landing-place for 
" run " goods. 

In 1734 the Cardiff Custom House officers 
reported to London that " when any boats goes 
out to 'em" [i.e., the smugglers] "the owners of 'em 
have always a spye on the officer ; and when they 
find him of one side of the river at Aberthaw, 
they'll land what they have of the other ; and 

7 



98 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

by reason there's no Boat in the Service, nor any 
boat on those accos t8 to be had for love or money, 
and the officer obliged to go to a bridge about two 
Miles round, they have time enough to secure 
the goods before he can get there. Nay, there is 
instances that they have run'd goods in the day 
time before the officers' face in this Manner." 
How horrible to contemplate ! 

Not far from Aberthaw is the village of St. 
Athan and the site of West Orchard Castle, once 
the scene of an extraordinary tragedy, still 
haunted by a sad remembering spirit. In the 
early summer mornings, before the dew is off the 
grass, a lady in white silken robes is seen to pass 
slowly round and round a particular spot. The 
reason of her appearance was a strange and tragic 
one. 

" Many centuries ago, Sir Jasper Birkrolles 
married a daughter of the powerful house of 
De Clair, who were Lords of Glamorgan. When 
Sir Jasper came back from the Second Crusade 
enemies whispered in his ear that his wife had 
been unfaithful to him during his absence. Lady 
Birkrolles vainly protested her innocence, her 
husband passed a savage sentence upon her. 

"In a field not far from the Castle he had a 
deep hole dug. There his beautiful wife was to 
be buried up to her neck and suffer death from 
slow starvation. She was not to have a crumb 
of bread nor a drop of water, in that hole she 
was to linger till she died. 

" Lady Birkrolles happened to have a sister, and 
this daughter of De Clair's begged that she might 
visit her sister once a day at least. The cruel 
husband consented, provided that she carried 
neither food nor drink with her. At dawn every 



BARRY ISLAND 99 

day the girl visited her miserable sister. Up and 
down the grass she trailed her long silk dress, 
that the miserable prisoner might suck moisture 
from the wet folds. For ten days Lady Birkrolles 
lived on this slender refreshment. On the tenth 
she died. A short while after her innocence was 
proved, and the wretched Sir Jasper died raving 
mad." 

It is said that as late as 1863 women who went 
milking in the early morning said they often saw 
a beautiful lady dressed in white going round and 
round a particular spot in the field, they could 
not tell why. 



CHAPTER X 

LLANTWIT MAJOR— ST. ILLTYD : A KNIGHT OF THE 
GRAIL— ST. DONAT'S 

Thinking of Illtyd the Breton Knight, you reach 
Llantwit to-day to feel bewildered by its mixed 
airs of change and unchange. Modern shops stare 
down the streets at some mediaeval inn, like the 
" Old White Swan " ; and the latest generation is 
seen mounting the steps of a time-honoured build- 
ing, once the old Town Hall, that became the 
National School. But those who go to Llantwit 
must not expect majestic ruins or a towering 
antiquity like Tintern Abbey. Its wonders are 
half secret, and ask more of the pilgrim than an 
hour's idle curiosity. Otherwise, he may go away 
disappointed, even when all is seen — the church, 
the sloping churchyard with its graves, and 
the adjacent half-obliterated traces of all that 
monastic settlement, with its corn mill, barn, 
dove-cot, guest-house, and prior's lodging, which 
once stood in the shallow vale of Odnant. 

The old Town Hall was still in use as a school on 
my last visit. If the outer steps are ascended to 
the upper part of the building, the door will 
usually be found on the latch ; but there is little 
to be seen within, unless it is in school hours, 

when the spectacle of the school children at their 

100 



LLANTWIT MAJOR 101 

tasks, and the hum of their voices, may call to 
mind that older school of divinity which once 
made Llantwit famous. Leaving the Town Hall 
on your left, you soon reach the church, well sunk 
in its hollow so as to be out of sight of the 
marauding Black Pagans. The brook Ogney 
afforded in its tiny valley just so much shelter as 
invited the early monks to make their abode here. 
As at St. David's, where the brook in the Vale of 
Roses offered another such hollow, the course of 
the small stream shows the line along which the 
monastic settlement and rude enclosures and 
wattle-huts were placed ; to give way in course 
of time to solid stone. Church and churchyard at 
Llantwit are full of these reminders. The church 
stands deep below the road, and steps and a 
slant path lead to the east-end of what is called 
the New Church, which is now in use. As you 
approach it, the old crosses and ancient monu- 
ments on the slope, no longer tell of the ages 
of its history ; they now stand within the 
walls. St. Illtyd's Stone, one of a series of three 
erected, or caused to be erected, by Samson, 
counts first because it is after St. Illtyd that 
Llantwit is called ; " Llan Illtyd " having gradu- 
ally been corrupted into its present form. 
Illtyd's church of wattle and clay stood, perhaps, 
where what is now known as the Old Church 
stands, west of the building in use. His monu- 
ment was carved by Samuel, the stonecarver, 
who has a claim thus to be the Father of Welsh 
sculptors. Samson's two other memorial stones 
used to stand by the porch of the western church. 
The Celtic tracery on the finer of the two is most 
beautiful. The eastern building, despite its name 
of the New Church, may look older than the un- 



102 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

cared-f or Old Church ; but there is little doubt 
that the latter name really perpetuates the site of 
the first church of all. Freeman's idea was that 
the so-called Old Church was the parish church, 
and the so-called New Church was attached to the 
monastery. The church now in use is a thirteenth- 
century building, with some alterations ; and it 
has a Norman font. The frescoes in the chancel 
represent Mary Magdalene and the Saviour, and 
the Fall of Man. The " Old Church," a late four- 
teenth-century recast, has become a kind of 
mysterious sculptor's gallery. Its sermons are 
carved stones, among them the Cross of Howell, 
whose inscription appears to run : " In the name 
of God the Father and the Son and Holy Ghost, 
Howell raised this cross for the soul of his father 
Rhys." Howell was a Prince of Morgan wg, a 
couple of hundred years before the Normans 
invaded it. 

Beyond the Old Church is the ruined Lady, or 
Galilee, Chapel, a fifteenth-century building, and 
beyond that again, and on the south-west corner 
of the churchyard, we see the remains of a fine old 
fourteenth-century house, used in its latter days as 
a mill, it is said : and to judge by its position above 
the brook Ogney, built to grind corn for the 
monastery here, whose buildings must at one time 
have almost completely hemmed in the church and 
churchyard. Across the brook, and on the rising 
ground above, there is a poor fragment of a gate- 
house, but the great tithe-barn is gone, which fed 
the mill. It had a particularly good oak roof, well 
preserved, and was, sixty years ago, as fine an old 
church barn as could be seen. The Dean and 
Chapter of Gloucester sold the oak roof for a mere 
song ; and the building that might have served 



LLANTWIT MAJOR 103 

the community for long as an interesting old land- 
mark went to rack and ruin. So I was told by an 
old standard of the place. 

Save for the stones of Illtyd and Samson and 
other noble fragments not too easy to identify, 
nearly all we see at Llantwit was, it is needless to 
say, built long after the early days of the Celtic 
church. The ecclesiastical buildings grew all 
through the Middle Ages, when Llantwit counted 
as one of the chief religious centres in South 
Wales. Thus it continued right into Tudor times, 
when the town waxed in turn, as you are 
driven to conclude in exploring the township 
and adjacencies. 

The village-town lies about a mile from the sea ; 
and the last part of the way thither lies through 
a cwm, shut in between wild coverts and grassy 
banks, like a cwm far inland. You go slowly 
meandering through it, like a man in a dream ; 
and if it is a calm day, you forget the sea, until, 
getting to its lower end, you see salt scurf and bits 
of seaweed on the grass. A rough rampart of 
earth and stone shuts off the seaward view : when 
you clamber over this, you find the pebbles of the 
beach banked high against it. If the tide is low 
you can get round the cliffs, which are from 70 to 
90 or 100 feet high, and on to the great slabs of 
smooth limestone, stretched flat at your feet. 
Over these roll rounded stones, like rejected 
cannon-balls ; while deep fissures and melancholy 
caves have eaten here and there into the lime- 
stone. There is something at once alluring and 
forbidding in the coast at this point. It is best to 
be seen with a flowing tide and a strong sou'- 
westcrly wind ; when the cannon-balls roll clank- 
ing about, mixed with wrack from lost ships. 



104 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

One day, we were caught by the tide, and 
penned in a cove which had luckily a steep zigzag 
track to the cliff-top. But the tide brought up, 
rolling them along with it, a broken keg, some 
battered hampers, and two sealed tins. With the 
blade of a pocket-knife we pierced one of the tins, 
and were alarmed by a spirt of vile gas which 
escaped hissing. We expected it to explode ; but 
it only contained some kind of salt fish, much de- 
composed. The other tin was full of rank butter. 

With a strong sou'-wester and a high tide, the 
waves dash high up the cliffs, and the spray 
reaches the sea-pinks and blue corn-cockles on 
their tops. The cliffs are not kind to unwary 
lovers who venture on them at dark. Only last 
spring a pair went walking toward St. Donat's. 
At a point where the track is close to the edge 
the youth slipped his foot, and falling, clutched 
at his companion's dress to save himself. Both 
went over. He was fatally hurt, and died where 
he fell. The girl escaped with broken bones and, 
the tide sparing her, she was rescued next morn- 
ing after a terrible night, during the first part of 
which she had his groans to add to her own 
torment. 

There are sea-places, stretches, and pitches of a 
rocky coast, especially those where the sea is eat- 
ing away the land, which affect one by a kind of 
indeterminate cruelty, almost malignity of aspect, 
seen partly in the colour, partly in the forms of 
the rocks. Here the stone is a cold grey, and often 
cruelly edged ; and it breaks treacherously under 
the feet and hands of the climber climbing up 
to escape the tide, which flows up with eagerly 
returning waves at the September high tides when 
a whipping wind is behind it. 



LLANTWIT MAJOR 105 

A little way up the brook, if you follow its 
course by the rough footpath, skirting its banks, 
and cross a stile or two, you come to the road 
under the so-called Castle, which appears to be in 
effect an old mansion, not older than the reign of 
Henry VII. If you look back from the southern 
walls towards the village and the Odnant cwm, 
you get a sudden sense of the immense antiquity 
that is buried there. The house you are standing 
near may be 400 years old, the church 700 years old, 
the crosses in the churchyard 1,400 years old. 

By following the winding cwm of the Odnant 
you can reach the sea in half an hour ; but there 
is a quicker way. If the bank is ascended opposite 
the church, and across the brook, some small 
cottages face the rough lane that leads to the sea ; 
and there is a stile leading into the fields within 
fifty yards, from which a footpath, not very clearly 
defined, will take you over three fields to join the 
cwm. Descending it, you cross the stream by stones 
(if the weather is dry enough) or by the footbridge, 
lower down. 

The cwm from the junction of the Ogney and 
the Odnant is called Cwm Col Hugh ; and the 
lower part of it, within the dike, has a strange 
aspect from the salt scum left at high tides on the 
grass. The meadows of Col Hugh are, in summer, 
the playground of crowds of holiday-seekers, who 
know nothing of the ancientry of Llantwit. If 
one climbs the steep eastern bank of the cwm, 
near its sea-outlet, one has Castle Ditches immedi- 
ately on one's left. The so-called Ditches, three in 
number, and unusually well marked, are the triple 
earth-works defending a very strong coast-fort or 
encampment, thrown up by the Danes in the 
eighth or ninth century, when Sweyn was active 



106 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

on this coast. From Col Hugh Point, if the tides 
serves (and the tide here has great " play "), a 
way can be found along the rocks, edged and 
harsh to the feet, past the Dimhole cwm and the 
sea-caves and broken cliffs, to Tresilian Bay and 
its cave. 

Tresilian has many and strange tales connected 
with it. The name " Tre-sulien," the town, or 
place, of Sulien, is taken from that St. Sulien 
whom the Black Pagans killed. Tresilian Court, 
now occupied as a country house, was once a farm- 
house-inn of the old Welsh kind. It was a great 
smugglers' and wreckers' resort in the " good old 
time " ; a Stevensonian romance might easily be 
written round it. Then, still earlier, here was the 
scene of the merry rites, or riots, of the " Gwyliau 
Mabsant " of this neighbourhood ; when all the 
country round came in carts and on horse or afoot, 
and feasted not wisely but too well. And then 
the fair Dwynwen of Tresilian Cave beguiled the 
youths and maidens who came to have their 
fortunes told by the method you may still adopt. 

The cave has, at a distance of seven or eight 
feet below its roof, a stone-rib, forming an arch. 
Lovers who wish to question Dwynwen, half 
sea-witch, half sea-goddess, must find a round 
pebble, and pitch it over this arch so that it falls 
clear on the other side without touching the 
rock, rib or ceiling. The exact formula, said to 
be muttered during the ceremony, I cannot trace. 
"Possibly," says one writer, "it was only ' Un, 
dau, tvi,' according to the number of attempts 
made ; each counting as another year to be passed 
before marriage ! " More probably a clear stone- 
cast meant good furtherance in the course of 
true love. 



LLANTWIT MAJOR 107 

At high tide good swimmers have been known 
to swim over the arch, and return, diving under 
it. A boat, too, has been piloted through the 
opening ; but you need to know the cave to 
risk it. From the back of the cave a small 
passage proceeds into the cliff, with many 
crevices ; and local tradition has it the passage 
is connected with St. Donat's Castle. This is no 
doubt the underground-passage myth common in 
all rural neighbourhoods. Formerly runaway mar- 
riages took place in the cave — according to the 
gossips ; and there is no doubt of one regular 
marriage at least which was celebrated in it — 
that of General Picton's parents. The cave used 
at that time to be called familiarly " St. Sulien's," 
as if it was a church, duly acknowledged ; or some 
say " Reynard's Church," perhaps alluding to the 
fox as a fitting priest for a clandestine marriage. 
It has been suggested, too, that a church stood a 
mile away southwards, where the sea now washes, 
but this, too, is a natural tradition for this sea- 
bitten coast. 

We can continue the sea-coast walk from 
Tresilian, with one interruption, to St. Donat's — 
St. Donat's, whose old gateway opens upon 
romance. What a history, and what a family ! 
For seven hundred years the Stradlings ruled 
there, beginning with the first Le Esterling who 
received St. Donat's at the hands of the con- 
queror Robert Fitzhamon. Knights, adventurers, 
smugglers, and wreckers, their motto, " Duw a 
ddigon" (God and enough), seems to have been 
cynically conceived. Yet just as you have 
decided that here was the dwelling of a lawless 
race — pious, learned, and cultured Stradlings come 
into view. There was Sir John Stradling, who 



108 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

died in 1637, a poet and a mighty scholar. Even 
by the time he graduated at Oxford he was 
" accounted a miracle for his forwardness in 
learning and pregnancy of parts." He passed 
as a typical cavalier, and wrote a poem to 
James L, and poems to Charles I., besides epi- 
grams to his friends. There were other Strad- 
lings — Sir Edwards and Sir Thomases — travellers 
and men of affairs, who built sea-walls at home 
and encouraged Welsh learning abroad. You 
realise here what a fine, fortunate stock it was 
that inherited St. Donat's, and paced its gardens 
devising great works, entertaining rare guests. 
Among the latter may be certainly counted 
Archbishop Usher, who fled here in 1646-1647 
from Cardiff, with his daughters and others, and 
was roughly used on the way. His hiding- 
chamber was behind the picture-gallery. Another 
refugee, in an earlier day, was Nicolas Break- 
spear, who became Pope Adrian IV., the only 
English Pope. 

The story of the last of the Stradlings, were 
it all unravelled, would fill a long mortal docu- 
ment. Born in 1712, Sir Thomas was at Oxford 
a fellow-student with a young man of the name 
of Tyrwhit. After the completion of their college 
career these two young men resolved to make 
the grand tour together. Before starting (as was 
afterwards shown in evidence) they each wrote a 
letter to the effect that if either of them should 
die whilst abroad, the survivor should inherit the 
deceased's property. After being absent some time 
from England, news came to St. Donat's that 
Stradling was dead, having been run through the 
body in a duel (it was said with his own friend, 
Tyrwhit) at Montpellier, in France, on the 27th of 



LLANTWIT MAJOR 109 

September, 1738. His body was brought to St. 
Donat's to be buried on the 19th of March follow- 
ing. Several rumours were then afloat that he 
had come to his end unfairly, and it was much 
doubted that it was his body that was sent over. 
So his old nurse, who sat up with the coffin when 
it was lying in state, secretly opened it, and 
thrust her hand in, to feel whether all the fingers 
were on the left hand, as she knew that Sir 
Thomas had, when a child, lost one of his fingers, 
it having been bitten off by a donkey. She 
declared that the two hands of the body sent over 
were perfect, and, therefore, that the body was 
not the body of Sir Thomas Stradling. Hence for 
many years there was an expectation of his 
making his appearance. After more than half 
a century spent in litigation, during which time 
Tyrwhit himself died, the estates were settled by 
Act of Parliament, the largest portion being sold 
to pay the lawyers ; and the only part which was 
allotted to the heirs of Tyrwhit, the inordinate 
claimant, was the Castle and about £1,200 a year, 
out of an estate which, at that time, was the 
Chatsworth of the period. Various claimants got 
small portions, but the baronetage became vested 
in the issue of Jane, daughter of Sir Edward 
Stradling, and wife of Thomas Carne of Nash ; 
and the property in course of time was re-acquired 
by her descendants, the Stradling-Carnes. More 
recently it has passed into the hands of another 
old Welsh family. 

The Castle itself is still a live castle ; and 
although a little over-restored, it is as gracious 
an abode for a man of estate as he could wish. 
It has Roman Emperors (who look rather out of 
place), and a fountain, in its court. It has a hall 



110 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

with a great hearth, and a music-gallery above ; 
and it has countless staircases, of stone or old 
oak, with passages and unexpected corridors ; and 
casements with a command now of the little green 
ravine, now of the gardens and seaward lawns ; 
altogether a covetable great house for the roman- 
tical soul to covet. 

One distinguished modern writer, "Vernon Lee," 
has been so far attracted by its implicit wildness 
as to give us a small, highly-coloured romance 
written round St. Donat's under the thin disguise 
of the Brandlings of St. Salvat's. In this tale the 
Castle and its surroundings are weirdly, yet 
exactly, painted. We read of "inland mountain 
lines, like cliffs, dim in the rain ; and at last, over 
the pale green fields, the sea — quite pale, almost 
white." . . . Then appeared " the top of a tower 
and a piece of battlemented wall, emerging from 
the misty woods, and a minute after we were at a 
tall gate tower, with a broken escutcheon and a 
drawbridge. . . . We stopped in a great castle 
yard, with paved paths across a kind of bowling- 
green, and at the steps of the house, built un- 
evenly all round, battlemented and turreted, with 
huge projecting windows made of little panes." 
Here is the theatre where is played out the un- 
equal duel between the high-bred and accom- 
plished young heir, who is accompanied by his 
bride, and the rough and dangerous crowd of 
smuggling, wrecking kinsmen who virtually hold 
them as prisoners. " What chiefly delights my 
romantic temper," writes the heroine, "are the 
woods in which the castle is hidden and its sin- 
gular position, on an utterly isolated little bay of 
this wild and dangerous coast." Below the wide 
descending Castle terraces is a little dingle, as 

- 



LL ANT WIT MAJOR 111 

green and lovely and innocent-looking as can be 
imagined. 

The Watch Tower, unique of its kind, stands on 
the park slope beyond the dingle, watching the 
coast for many miles. Its original use was to 
spy for ships, and to exhibit a wreckers' light ; 
so the old story has it. The tower is quadran- 
gular, thirty feet in height, and its stair leads 
to a projecting platformed turret. It is a fif- 
teenth-century erection. The church is under the 
Castle. As one enters the churchyard, the superb 
cross on the north of the church lends a grace 
to the tree-kept enclosure and its graves, and the 
venerable tower. This cross dates from the twelfth 
century, and it is amazing to think how it has 
outlasted time and mischance, though the carving 
on its head has been blunted and weathered. The 
Church is more striking as a living interior, meant 
for service as well as memory, than Llantwit. 
The Stradling Chapel, added in the sixteenth 
century to the original church, is a notable 
monument to that rare old family. If these 
tombs could but speak ! 

The last of the Stradlings, the young and ill- 
fated Sir Thomas, whose tale we have already 
told, went to his grave lit by a wild sort of torch- 
light, for on that occasion a fire broke out in the 
Castle, and did sad havoc, especially in the picture- 
gallery — a singular accident to happen on a day 
of mourning. 

St. Donat's, too, has its ghostly visitant. Once 
a year, Mallt-y-nos, poor Matilda of the Night, 
comes in a dark gown — some say dark blue, some 
dark red— to St. Donat's Castle to hunt for the 
soul of Colyn Dolphyn, the Breton pirate. Colyn 
Dolphyn was once a name of fate at St. Donat's ; 



112 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

he it was who captured Sir Harry Stradling, who 
built the famous old watch-tower. Colyn Dolphyn 
(whose effigy used to be burnt once a year on the 
sands near Llantwit, so great a scourge was he) 
put Sir Harry to ransom at 2,000 marks. To pay 
this great sum five manors were sold by the 
Stradling family. This happened about 1480. By 
that time poor Matilda had been hunting the 
heavens with her ghostly hounds for three hun- 
dred years. She was a Norman who came to 
Glamorgan with Fitzhamon. She was so pas- 
sionately fond of hunting that when spoken to 
by a holy man concerning the future life and her 
conduct here below, she answered, " If I cannot 
hunt in heaven, I would rather not go there"; 
a sentiment which rather reminds one of the 
"En Paradis qu' ai-je a faire?" of Aucassin. For 
this speech Matilda was sent hunting for ever 
with the ghostly Cwn Annwn, or Hounds of Hades, 
who hunt the air on stormy nights with bayings 
and cries. Did poor Matilda on one of her ghostly 
huntings happen to meet with Sir Harry Strad- 
ling that, even so late as 1850, she should still be 
hunting his tormentor, Colyn Dolphyn ? Sir Harry 
never returned to St. Donat's, but went on pil- 
grimage to Jerusalem, as did many of the Strad- 
lings, and died on the way home at Famagusta. 

Wandering in South Wales, one is apt to look 
upon castles as giant milestones, and measure 
one's course by the landmarks they so temptingly 
exhibit. After St. Donat's one naturally thinks 
next of Dunraven — a matter of four miles away 
as the crow flies ; but the coast is a difficult 
one. We are still on the dangerous rocks of the 
Upper Lias formation, and Nash Point is a for- 
midable place enough. What says the old sailor 



LLANTWIT MAJOR 113 

as he runs down Bristol Channel past Nash Point ? 
" If the Great Gutter or Nash Passage roars louder 
than Breaksea Point " (which he passed awhile 
ago), " the trip will be an unlucky one." 

Moreover, beware of Nash Sands. Why ? 
" Because there is a winch in them." Now a 
" winch " is a very curious thing : a sort of 
bottomless whirlpool into which, if your body 
fall, it will never be seen again. So swimmers 
are warned against the " winch " in Nash Passage, 
which is known down there as the Great Gutter. 
Very often a lovely lady sits and lures people into 
the winch. One cannot help thinking there was 
a winch in the Rhine, retained in the immediate 
service of the Lorelei. 

In the graveyard at Monknash a stone, with an 
anchor for emblem, may be seen, erected by volun- 
tary subscription — 

1 ' To the Memory of the shipwrecked crew of the Malleny : 
Lost on the Tusker rock, 15 Octr. 1886." 

The first two occupants of this sailors' grave are 
simply notified as — 

"1. Unrecognized. 
2. Unrecognized." 

Then follow two younger sailors, duly named. 
One is the more struck by this gravestone, because 
of old it was the custom on this coast — notorious 
for its wreckers — to show small pity or charity 
to the drowning or the drowned ; and here we 
have the simple confession of much kindness, and 
the atonement of one generation for another, 
written on a stone. The waves that break around 

8 



114 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

the dreaded Nash Point are called "the Merry 
Dancers," and the souls of the drowned were once 
thought to be holding revels among them. 

Let us get on to firm ground and betake our- 
selves to Dunraven. 



CHAPTER XI 

DUNRAVEN — SOUTHERNDOWN — COWBRIDGE — ST. 
QUINTIN'S — PENLLINE — EWENNY — BRIDGEND — 
COITY— OGMORE — CANDLESTON. 

Dunraven lies over the bold shoulder of the Great 
Southern Down, above Ogwr estuary, which gives 
its name to Southerndown, the watering-place. 
Dunraven Castle itself is a modern one, a building 
with nothing really castle-like about it, and indeed 
the most disappointing in the district. The Welsh 
original form of the name was Dun-drivan, Dinas- 
tri-fan, the " Dun " of three courts. The spacious 
stableyard and the garden terraces on the north 
are sheltered in the wooded cwm behind the huge 
rocky rampart on which the house stands. The 
formidable sea-front of this rock recalls the ill re- 
putation that the Castle had formerly as a deadly 
lure for the vessels passing up and down the 
coast ; and the name of the point, " Trwyn-y- 
Witch " (Witch's Snout), is quite in keeping with 
the place. Two centuries ago, when the Castle 
was owned by the Vaughans, Sir Richard, follow- 
ing the custom, used to exhibit false lights to lure 
vessels on to the Taskar Rock opposite, so that 
they might be wrecked on his foreshore and 
become his property ; but the Taskar proved in 
the end an ill friend to him. One summer's day 
two of his sons rowed out to the rock, at the 

115 



116 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

tide's ebb, and disembarking there forgot to secure 
the boat, which floated away as the tide returned, 
and the two were drowned in full sight of their 
parents, no other boat being obtainable. During 
the confusion a younger child fell into a vessel of 
whey, and was drowned on shore. So the parents 
were left desolate, and gave up the place, when 
it passed to the Wyndham family, now repre- 
sented by the Earl of Dunraven. 

It was an earlier Vaughan, " Mat of the Iron 
Hand," who was most notorious of all as a 
wrecker. Between pirates like Colyn Dolphyn 
afloat and wreckers like Mat lying in wait ashore, 
the old Bristol-bound East Indiamen and other 
ships had often a hard passage up Channel. 

The double cave at Dunraven is on a larger 
scale than any on this part of the coast. When 
the gates are open there should be no difficulty in 
making a way round by the walks east of the 
Castle to the descent on the south-east of the 
Head. But the cave is only to be explored at low 
water. The sea has worked here upon the lime- 
stone, eating out its softer parts, and excavating a 
cavern, with a nobly architectured portal. You 
must follow the sea-links westward from Dun- 
raven above Southerndown Sands for " Pwll-y- 
Gwynt," the " wind-hole." It is said not to have 
so effective an upward blast as it used to have ; 
but the rush of air and the noise, harsh or 
rumbling, of the waves have a curious and 
uncanny effect as the tide returns. The Fairy 
Cave lies still a couple of hundred paces further 
on in the same direction — so called because of 
its fairy-like limestone mouldings, not because 
it is especially the haunt of the "Tylwyth Teg," 
or Fair Family. 



DUNRAVEN 117 

The Welsh traditions that are, or have been, 
grafted on the rock of Dundrivan are too many 
and too obstinate to be neglected. By the first 
and stubbornest of them, the old British caer here 
was the stronghold first of Bran, son of Llyr, then 
of his son Ceredig or Caractacus. After Fitz- 
hamon had got hold on Morganwg William de 
Londres seized on Dunraven and Ogmore, and 
planted the usual makeshift site-appropriating 
castles. While he was away at Kidwelly, the 
Welsh under Pain Turberville — for already there 
were Norman quarrels afoot — attacked the new 
seats and domains, and were driven off by Arnold 
Butler, castellan and deputy of De Londres, whose 
reward in the end was Dunraven. It remained 
in the Butler family for centuries, and then by an 
heiress's marriage it went to the Vaughans — an 
interesting case of Welsh reversion. Another two 
centuries, and Sir Richard Vaughan, after the 
drowning of his three sons, sold the ill-omened 
place to Humphry Wyndham, who also had Celtic 
blood in him, being of Irish stock. That was in 
1612, and one wonders whether the O'Neil mas- 
sacre of the previous year had anything to do 
with Wyndham's desire for a Welsh estate? He 
married a Welsh wife, Jane Carne of Ewenny ; 
and of that marriage come the present Earls of 
Dunraven, who seem to maintain a certain love 
of the sea. One wishes they would build a proper 
castle worthy of the site, as well as racing-yachts. 

One morning, after exploring the headland and 
the Witch's Snout, I and David were tempted by 
a vain desire to link Dunraven with the other 
inland castles. He surmised that Sir Arnold, 
alias Arnold Butler, was figured in one of the 
Arthurian tales — the Welsh Decameron; and that 



118 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

another knight of the same levy came from 
Penlline, near Cowbridge. So thither we rode 
by devious ways — on bicycles. 

Looking from Penlline Hill, one can easily recall 
the Cowbridge that was first circled with walls 
and then with castles. For, beyond Llanblethian 
and its castle and fine church, you have Beaupre 
on the south-east and Nash on the south-west, 
and, a little further on, Flemingston, with Fonmon 
and Penmark within an hour's ride ; and about 
the same distance from the coast, working west, 
East Orchard Castle and West Orchard Castle, 
and then, to wind up, the sea-front fortified at 
every strategic point and every part, from Barry 
to St. Donat's and Dundrivan (Dunraven). 

Like the Vale of Glamorgan, in whose very 
heart it lies, Cowbridge town is cut in two by 
the river Thaw ; and its interminable street rises 
slowly from its half-way bridge in either direction 
to the East village and the West village. A side- 
street leads to the Grammar School and the 
church, and reveals some remains of the older 
Cowbridge that the founders of the Grammar 
School, with Sir Leoline Jenkins at their head, 
knew. This shy street leads out eventually 
through an old archway, passing the limits, 
plainly visible there, of the old town-walls ; and 
so arrives in a green region of hill and meadow, 
with the Castle of Llanblethian, or St. Quintin, 
within a mile or less. Thither lies a most delight- 
ful summer's afternoon walk ; for although little 
of the Castle is left, it lends the place its flavour 
of memorial things. All that is to be seen of it 
may be inspected from the road. It consists 
chiefly of the arched gateway, with part of a 
tower and remains of the shell of the outer court. 



DUNRAVEN 119 

Down below, the massive abutments of the 
church tower, and the other external effects of 
Cowbridge Church, make it look like a fortified 
thing too. The church interior is puzzling ; for 
since originally it was merely a chapel-of-ease to 
Llanblethian, it was designed on a smaller scale. 
Then, as Cowbridge town grew, and more seats 
were required, first one aisle was added to the 
nave and then another to the Chancel. 

"Penlline Castle was the first bold landmark to 
be descried, looking westward from Cowbridge. 
It was placed on a fine natural site so as to 
command the Vale of Glamorgan, in a way that 
must have been very formidable to conjecturing 
besiegers. Formerly, when St. Quentin's Castle 
was fully manned and armed on the hill of 
Llanblethian over Cowbridge town, and the walls 
and gateways of the town below were complete, 
this must have formed almost a perfect example 
of a Norman fortified valley, armed at all points 
because it went in continual terror of the Welsh 
hill-lords and highlanders." So David. 

If you return to the western high-road, bound 
for Ewenny, after leaving Penlline, you reach, at 
two miles from Cowbridge, the spot known in 
Welsh as " Milltir Aur," or Golden Mile, where, 
the legend declares, Einon and Iestyn paid their 
Norman allies in gold for their services in de- 
feating Rhys ; and then quarrelled over Iestyn's 
daughter. 

"This lady I gat by my prowess in arms, and 
the prowess of my Frankish allies ! " Einon said 
no doubt, much after the fashion of Sir Hontzlac 
of Gwent. 

But Iestyn, thinking the Frankish host well 
disposed of, was not ready to fulfil his promise 



120 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

and give up his daughter. The end of this we 
know. Einon recalled his Frankish friends, and 
the end was the battle where Iestyn fell, at 
Mynydd Bychan (Little Mountain), now known 
as the Heath, Cardiff. But meanwhile one's 
heart bleeds for Iestyn's daughter, and grieves 
like Gwiffert over Enid, to see " one of her noble 
mien so deeply afflicted ! " 

The Golden Mile points the way now to Ewenny 
Priory. It is impossible to-day to approach 
Ewenny in any spirit of mediaeval piety, any 
taking of romance, without hearing the monks 
chant within, as one catches sight of its noble 
abbatine tower among the trees. 

The old Abbey Church, with its massive fortified 
true Norman tower, bulking large in its green 
surroundings, recalls too Freeman's praise. It 
gives you the best idea you can gain anywhere of 
an ecclesiastical strong-house, " union of castle 
and monastery in the same structure ! " Only part 
of the exterior can be seen, for the northern side, 
the transept walls, that is, abut on the private 
grounds. Within, the impression is of a sombre, 
august building, such as our modern eyes can rarely 
see. The burly pillars, rude Norman arches and 
round-topped windows, are all in keeping. The 
whole building is not left to us ; but the nave and 
north aisle, and the southern flank of the transept 
and the Priory Chapel, are enough to show the 
whole strong design. The tomb of the founder, 
Maurice de Londres, is in the Priory Chapel ; and 
other tombs of other old Norman and Norman- 
Welsh houses, the Turbervilles among them, and 
the ubiquitous Carnes. It is hard to realise now 
the strength and size of the whole monastic settle- 
ment. Signs of the great battlemented wall are 



DUNRAVEN 121 

plainly to be discerned ; but one must be permitted 
to explore carefully the surroundings of the 
present house and the garden-close to replace 
all the range of buildings. The present mansion 
was built in George III.'s reign. 

Ewenny was founded as early as 1146, as a 
Benedictine monastery ; that is, while the Norman 
tenure of this region was still a hazardous one. 
It must have taken many years a-building. When 
it passed into the hands of the Turbervilles, whose 
descendants still hold it, we cannot say. The 
Turbervilles were originally allotted Coity in the 
Fitzhamon parcelling out of the district. Among 
the tombs will be found some curious epitaphs, and 
particularly this, which is impressively turned, in 
honour of one of the Carnes : — 

"Here lys Ewenny's hope, Ewenny's pride, 
In him both flourish'd, and in him both dyd. 
Death having seis'd him, linger'd loath to be 
The mine of this worthy family." 

After such a crow's circuit round these ancient 
houses and lands, one is seized upon by a curious 
sense of the actuality of the scenes and episodes 
that have become romance; they are in fact now 
a part of our collective memory. You lift the 
lid of an old tomb at Ewenny, and the creature of 
actuality looks out at you, half " a fiendly dragon " 
like an heraldic beast, half the plain human 
visage of a Carne or a Turberville. 

In Welsh, Pen-y-Bont-yr-Ogwr (End of the 
Bridge of Ogwr), Bridgend formerly owed its 
name and character to its command of the Ogwr, 
once a fine old salmon stream. The town, like 
many other quiet country places, is not amusing 



122 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

to the casual wayfarer, save when fair-days and 
market-days bring country people and life from 
without into its long streets. Bridgend has nothing 
to show of its vanished " Old Castle," which still 
gives a name to the southern quarter of the town, 
placed on the east bank of the river. Its " New 
Castle," as its higher and better site deserves, 
still stands siege with a gateway and ruined court, 
and still gives a name to the northern suburb of 
the town, on the west bank of the stream. In 
crossing the old bridge for the church and the 
New Castle, casual acquaintance may be made 
with the Ogwr. You will not see a salmon, but 
you will see a salmon-water which thousands and 
thousands of that noble fish have coursed. Sixty 
years ago and more this bridge was the rendez- 
vous for the salmon poachers of the town, who, 
leaning over its parapets, pipe in mouth, used, as 
gossips tell, to calculate the state of the water 
and the chances of the night's sport. 

Writing eighty years ago, Hansard gave a notable 
account of these night-poachers and their ways : — 

" From the commencement of the spawning season, at the 
latter end of September, until January, parties are engaged 
every moonless night in spearing salmon by torchlight, whilst 
roaming upon the shallow gravelly streams in search of a 
suitable spot for depositing their ova. On such situations 
they congregate to the number of twenty or thirty in a 
shoal, rooting up the bed of the river like hogs. The 
poachers, aware of their favourite haunts, assemble about 
midnight, and having kindled a small bundle of straw, by 
means of a tinder-box, one of the party holds the light over 
the water, being closely followed by the spearrnan, armed with 
a heavy trident, and behind walks a third person, carrying 
on his back a large supply of fuel, as, in windy nights 
especially, the straw is rapidly consumed. The instant that 
the surface of the stream becomes illumined by the torch, 



DUNRAVEN 123 

which renders eveiw object, even the smallest portion of 
gravel, distinctly visible, the whole shoal of salmon dart to- 
wards the light, and the spearman, instantly selecting the 
largest fish, hurls his weapon with unerring aim, and, if an 
old hand, never fails of transfixing his scaly prey. He then 
immediately throws the fish upon the bank, and, quickly 
disengaging the spear with his foot, stands ready to repeat 
the blow. It frequently happens that, if he strike a large 
fish, the poacher is compelled to leap into the stream; for 
the salmon proves exceedingly strong in his element. These 
depredators proceed, in a similar manner, from station to 
station, until the approach of day warns them to depart." 

We read that " on the 13th of August, 1838, 112 
sewen were caught, at one haul, in this stream." 

Leaving the old bridge, if we go up the Castle 
Hill, we come to the Square, where we have 
St. Illtyd's Church on our left, and closely neigh- 
bouring it, perched higher on the riverside cliff, 
the remains of the Castle itself. A tower, a 
broken curtain wall, a part of another tower, 
are all that is left of the stronghold whose 
strength once made it possible for the town to 
wax fat and prosperous under the hand of its cas- 
tellans. Sir Simon de Turberville was the original 
founder. To find the traces of Bridgend Old 
Castle, at the other side of the town, is more 
difficult, and all we can do is to point out its site 
and a possible remnant of its stones in some of 
the older houses near the river. It was situated 
in a low, badly chosen site, behind the present 
Church Street, on the opposite bend of the river, 
whose waters were doubtless used to surround it, 
and isolate it, if necessary, in time of attack. 

A footpath may be taken to Coity Castle, once 
a very important stronghold— one of the five 
strongest in all Glamorgan. It stands on an earth- 



124 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

work, which may have been there long before the 
Castle ; for if there is anything certain in a dis- 
puted land of hilly circumstance, it is that the 
same sites are likely to be seized upon over and 
over during the succession of occupiers, British, 
Roman, Welsh, Norman. The most striking part 
of the ruin is not the oldest, and probably dates 
no further back than Henry V.'s reign. 

The late G. T. Clark says of the Castle (in his 
Land of Morgan) : " Pagan de Turberville had 
Coity, much celebrated in bardic story as the 
seat of a royal lineage. He, or his son, strength- 
ened their position by marrying the dispossessed 
Welsh heiress. The family always showed Welsh 
sympathies, and continued to hold high rank in 
the county till the fifteenth century, when the 
main line failed." Morgan, whose daughter thus 
made the first Welsh-Norman marriage on record, 
was a great man in his day. He challenged Pagan 
(or Payn) de Turberville to single combat, if he 
preferred that to marrying the maid. The maid's 
eyes settled the matter, for the Norman handed 
his sword to Morgan as a sign of friendly agree- 
ment. From the Turbervilles, Coity passed to the 
Berkrolles and Sydneys. 

From Bridgend or from Ewenny you easily reach 
Ogmore Castle. Not much is left of it but the keep, 
the broken containing-wall of the close, and the 
now scarce discernible ground-plan of the chapel. 
The powerful De Londres, who built and held it, 
would find it hard to recognise his kingdom in 
this gapp'd and crack'd decay. But while men and 
castles dwindle, the Ogmore limestone spring, at the 
edge of the down, about three hundred yards east 
of the Castle, is as strong and lively as ever, and 
is now used to supply Bridgend with water. The 



DUNRAVEN 125 

supply never gives out in the driest season ; and 
this and the strangeness of its sudden apparition 
account for the folk-tale which accords it an 
underground passage to St. Bride's Major. The 
limestone all through South Wales is something 
of a natural magician. One curious property of 
the spring is that it is of dual character, one of its 
currents being of much harder water than the 
other, and impregnated with magnesia. 

From Ogmore Castle, it is but a step on to 
Candleston (or Cantilupeston) Castle, which can 
be reached in a twenty minutes' walk. First 
cross St. Teilo's stepping stones, as the Saint may 
have done long ago (when he had a wattled cell 
near the spring), then cross the swampy ground 
between the Ewenny and the Ogmore and the 
bridge over the latter. Candleston Castle lies on 
the left, through the lane and along the fir plan- 
tation, on the brink of Merthyr Mawr warren. 
The Castle, one of those built by De Londres, 
picture of desolation as it is, its last tower con- 
fronting the sands, shows no sign now of the sup- 
posed Flemish work about it and its scanty 
remains. At the end of the eighteenth century 
a mansion was built near by, but that too is gone 
to ruin. The trees have a grey and wizened air, 
as if they sympathised with the old walls. Candle- 
ston, with rabbits for sole tenantry, with its 
sandy ravine and ghostly woods, has lost touch 
with history ; but it might, if it could, tell of the 
day when the men of De Londres rode across the 
sands from Newton Nottage, carrying an un- 
happy prisoner with them — a luckless Welsh 
raider whom they could presently bind fast to a 
post and then leave him to the tender mercies of 
the incoming tide. 



CHAPTER XII 

NEWTON NOTTAGE — PORTHCAWL — KENFIG — " THE 
CLERK OF KENFIG " 

It is a wild stretch of coast that runs westward 
now from the estuary of Ogmore River. The 
battle between sea and land is fought there with 
endless change of fortune : the sea hurls up 
billows of sand to choke the fields and bury the 
houses ; the land sends out deadly ridges of low 
rock to the murder of ships that pass in the 
Severn Sea. 

Newton Nottage here stands back from the 
sea, with a broad belt of half-clothed dunes be- 
tween. The village is a survival of other days, 
worth making acquaintance with, whose people 
are people of character and humour, and of a 
canny quality too, unless one proverb belies them. 
The church, again, is original in its antiquity; 
and its tower is not like other towers, but has 
an " air," not easy to realise as it stares across at 
the Merthyr Mawr warren like some amazed and 
amazing creature spawned by a primitive world. 
Its interior is remarkable for its carven pulpit, 
depicting the Roman soldiers beating with thongs 
the person of the Saviour ; and the approach to 
the pulpit is unusual and ingenious enough to 
please a child. 

126 



NEWTON NOTTAGE 127 

Here is St. John's Well, whose sweet water 
rises and falls with the sea-tide. Not far from it 
to the south-west are the remains of a small cir- 
cular enclosure. In the year 1820 the Rev. Hey 
Knight was told by the old people of Newton 
" that there had been a custom of kindling a 
fire in it annually on midsummer day, throwing 
a small cheese or cake across it, and then jumping 
over the embers." 

The same writer gives detailed particulars of 
the shore, which, he said, " westward from the 
Black rocks consists of drift sand and rolled 
pebbles. This flat beach is divided at Newton 
Point and Middle Point by skers or projecting 
ridges of low rock." Each of these spits, as well 
as the higher point at Porthcawl (so named from 
two fishing weirs formerly placed there), is prob- 
ably continued into the Channel to the south 
and east under the names of the Patches and 
the Tusker. The latter rock has a beacon on it, 
and is especially dangerous from the deadly 
skers which open out at its western end ; upon 
them the tide sets with a heavy break in rough 
weather. 

Knight does not mention the local super- 
stition, still current to-day, that on nights fore- 
boding storm, a warning phantom light is seen 
hovering over the Tusker Rocks and the Sker 
Rock. Another of the flood traditions lingers in 
Newton ; there is an old prophecy that " the sea 
shall return and ships be moored to a sycamore- 
tree growing on the top of Newton Clovis." If we 
like to take it so, we may find an extraordinary 
confirmation of this saying in the fact that when 
the foundations of an old house in this neighbour- 
hood were re-dug, a drift of sand like a raised 



128 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

beach was found below them. The sea had been 
there before ; just as certainly the sea is gaining 
upon this coast again. 

Dutch vessels northward of their true course, 
and deceived by the similarity of soundings, 
sometimes came up the Bristol instead of the 
English Channel — an error often fatal before light- 
house days. A flat stone in Newton Churchyard 
commemorates the loss of a young family, three 
sons of J. S. Jackerd, sent from Surinam in the 
planter's own ship westward bound to Amster- 
dam, wrecked on the night of the 3rd of June, 
1770. Many soldiers lost in one of the transports 
for Bristol in the Irish Rebellion, 1798, were buried 
in Cae Newydd, Porthcawl, and the plough for 
long spared the turf above them. 

This is the region which Blackmore has pictured 
in his Maid of Sker, on the whole the best novel 
of South Wales and its sea-coast ever written by 
any writer. Sker House lies direct south, and 
the sands of Sker lie rather to the west of Kenfig. 
But Newton Nottage, as readers of the novel in 
question may like to know, is the village of the 
story; and at Nottage House the late Mr. Black- 
more stayed for a time, and there gathered the 
local lore and material that he turned to account 
afterwards. 

Newton Nottage lies at the base of a little 
promontory that juts well out into the Severn 
Sea, catching the freshest and raciest Atlantic 
breezes. Here is Porthcawl, a delightful little 
place for those who happen to like it. The town 
is no more than a couple of streets or so, one 
ending in a paved, wind-swept esplanade. Add to 
these a small dock, and just as much shipping of 
coal and limestone as may lend an air of business 



NEWTON NOTTAGE 129 

to a summer day, and beguile the visitor into 
whiling away a lazy afternoon and thinking he 
has done something, since a vessel has stowed 
her ounkers and put to sea : and that is Porth- 
cawl. 

On a rough day the waves make great play 
about the miniature pier that defends the dock, 
and a walk along the salt rampart may end in a 
cold shower-bath on the head of the unwary. But 
there are calm days at Porthcawl when it is excel- 
lent to sit and dream among the tansies on the 
low cliffs with an eye on the clean half-circle 
of sand and the blue curve of the tide as it 
advances or retreats. As for the wildish sur- 
roundings of Porthcawl, no summer haunt could 
be more delightful than its miles of dunes. 
"There are," writes G. R., "extraordinary numbers 
of wild flowers, many in their miniature state, 
to be gathered here. Nowhere have I seen 
Viper's Bugloss grow as it does on these dunes 
in wizard rank and file. It is a queer plant, with 
its grey-green bristly foliage and curved flower- 
spikes that change from bright rose-colour to 
brilliant hue. It was a friend to the Greeks, who 
gave it its strange name of Cow-tongue Viper- 
bite Healer; cow-tongued because the curious curve 
of the flower-spike is exactly that described by 
the tongue of the cow who fetches clothes off a 
hedge or tufts of grass from the sod. It may 
have been some Greek herd-girl, who, while she 
sat on the ground to watch her cows feed, noted 
the curious prehensile twist of the tongue, and 
first gave this name to the flower." 

In the sandy desolation east of Porthcawl lies all 
that is left of Kenfig town to-day : a scattered ham- 
let with the last fragment of a castle tower thrust 

9 






130 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

up like the hand of a buried man through the 
sand. Entering Kenfig to-day by its loneliest 
road from the east, one hardly believes in its 
existence as a live place, so dispersed and silent 
among its sands. Even its church tower is not 
at once visible, and the few houses are hidden 
in the perspective, one behind another. But this 
loneliness and unusualness makes the place more 
interesting in the day of towns. Passing by the 
first old inn, you cross the sandy turf, find a sort 
of sandy lane or street, and make the circuit then 
of the churchyard, and enter by the stile on its 
west side. The church is nothing architecturally, 
but it is in tune with the place. 

The old Town Hall is now the Prince of Wales 
Inn, and there may be seen the old town charters, 
and other documents, bearing witness to the 
Kenfig that was. To-day it is a place apart, like 
no other that I know ; an amazing place with an 
heroic record : the struggle of the community 
during hundreds of years with an irresistible 
army of sand, whose tents and entrenchments 
you see all round it. " The sand came up like 
snow and buried the houses," the old people will 
tell you. To-day the drift still goes on ; while six 
hundred years ago it was coming steadily inland, 
each storm bringing the sand higher. The first 
mention of these inroads is preserved in the record 
of reduced rent for a warren called " the Rabbits' 
Pasture," " because the great party is drowned by 
the sea." This was in the year 1316. More than 
two hundred years later the good traveller John 
Leland writes : " There is a village on the Est 
side of Kenfik and a Castel, booth in Ruines and 
almost shokid and devowrid with the Sandes that 
the Severn Se ther castith up." 



NEWTON NOTTAGE 131 

No wonder that the place wears the look of wild 
desolation to-day, which was already a ruin and 
desolation, choked and devoured, nearly four 
centuries ago. 

Yet it was (for that day) a large and important 
town that waged this losing battle, as we learn 
from the Kenfig ordinances drawn up in the 
fourth year of Edward III., which any curious 
persons can read in Mr. Thomas Gray's admi- 
rable book on Kenfig. It was a walled town 
with paved ways ; it had from seven to eight 
hundred inhabitants. It had a river up which 
came merchandise and timber in " ship lettes." 
It had a stout paternal government of portreeve 
and burgesses. Most of the houses were of wood, 
and the town was not only drowned in sand, but 
burned again and again ; for the nest of fighting- 
men up at the Castle were for ever waging war, 
and each battle that came up against it first 
burned the town by way of recreation. It was 
for ever being rebuilt, and later on more soundly : 
the ordinances certainly disclose a most respect- 
able state of things. 

In these days of licensed shoddy and exploita- 
tion of the poor by rich manufacturers, it is a 
wholesome lesson upon national backsliding to 
read these Kenfig ordinances. The very first is 
that " Good and sufficient bread " of " true size " 
shall be sold to the inhabitants " on pain of a 
grievous amerciment at the portreeve's pleasure." 
Then comes provision for good and wholesome 
ale and fresh meat; also cheese, butter, eggs, 
capons, and other " good and wholesome and 
sufficient victuals unblown." The leather must 
be good. " Every tanner using the mystery of 
tanning shall sell their leather well and suffi- 



132 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

ciently tanned accordingly, upon pain of forfeiture 
of his said leather or a fine." 

They were very particular to keep the town 
tidy ; no tradesman or housewife must throw 
anything whatsoever into the street ; each tenant 
cleans his own piece of street ; " and where the 
streets be unpav'd, every man to pave the same, 
upon pain of amerciament, before his door." No 
milking was to be done in the town ; " nor none 
shall suffer their beasts to abide in the High 
Street nor in noe other street by night nor by 
day, but only going and coming to and from their 
pastures." " Noe manner of person shall have 
any swine going within the town walls." 

On the point of good behaviour these burgesses 
were quite as strict as on that of cleanliness. 
"Noe stranger shall walk by night after nine of 
the clock." " Noe manner of person shall play at 
dice, cards, bowles, nor no other unlawful games 
within the said town." All " licentious naughti- 
packs " were fined ten shillings. " Brawlers and 
fighters that draweth blood the one upon the 
other shall pay three and fourpence for the 
bloodshed." 

Women brawlers were differently dealt with. 
" Item it is ordained that if any woman be found 
guilty [by six men] of scolding or railing any 
burgess or their wives or any other of their 
neighbours, then she to be brought at the first 
fault to the cucking-stool there to sit one hour, 
and the second fault two hours and third fault 
to lett slippe" — that is, to let the poor scold slip 
into the water. 

Alas ! all this righteousness could not save the 
town from the onslaught of the sand. A hint of 
this ever-present danger can be discovered in 



NEWTON NOTTAGE 133 

the wording of the last ordinance. " Noe manner 
of person or persons whatsoever shall reap any 
sedges neither draw nor pull any rootes nor cutt 
any furzes in any place whatsoever, nor do any 
other thing that may be to the ruin, destruction 
and overthrow of the said burrough." 

More than two hundred years after the expi- 
ring town utters a sad complaint, which is ap- 
pended to these ordinances in the reign of 
Elizabeth. The poor burgesses " doe yearly fall 
in arrearages and losses ... by reason of the 
overthrow, blowing and choaking up of sand in 
drowning of our town and church " (this church 
is completely disappeared), " with a number of 
acres of free lands, besides all the burgages of 
ground within the said lybertys except three for 
the which burgages so lost by the said overthrow 
yett nevertheless the rent thereof is and hath 
allways been paid to the lords receivers to the 
portreeve's great loss and hinderance." Poor 
Portreeve. 

It is strange that Kenfig should not only have 
been engulfed in sand, but that there should be 
a legend, of a much earlier period, retailed by 
Iolo Morganwg, to the effect that another town 
was swallowed up beneath the waters of Kenfig 
Pool. The Pool is not visible from the village, 
but it lies within half a mile of it. You have but 
to follow westward the sandy track on the north 
side of the church, and skirt the hedge that 
divides the cultivated fields, then, from the sandy 
heath, and as the last enclosed fields ends, make 
for a small group of trees a little ahead. These 
trees do not stand on the edge of the water, as 
they might appear to do, but the Pool is plain 
to see when they are reached. In spite, or because 



134 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

of, its desolate surroundings, the Pool is a place 
that exerts a positive fascination, quite enough 
to revive the feeling that the Welsh attached to 
their lakes and llyns and legends of lost towns. 
The teal and wild duck, as they take wing or skim 
the water, lead their own life, undisturbed by the 
ghosts of the past. An old boathouse, two or 
three paces from the northern shore, stands in 
the water, as sole sign of human visitation on its 
banks. 

There it lies, sweet-watered, among the choking 
sand-hills that are slowly reducing its sixty-eight 
acres ; so near to the sea, girt round with sea-sand, 
below the sea-level, and yet always fresh. The 
waters of the sea can be seen when the sunlight 
favours, shining and hovering apparently far above 
its head, an uncertain ridge of sand-hills between. 
As you look into the pool, you do not wonder 
that tradition attached a tale to so mysterious a 
spot, that had seen Roman, Norman, and Welshman 
alike disappear. 

The legend of Kenfig Pool is very like that told 
of Llangorse Lake, or Llyn Safaddan, in Brecon- 
shire. But the Kenfig story is still more signifi- 
cant : one to be recalled with a strange context 
in this countryside of mixed Welsh and Norman 
romance, for it has a Welsh hero, in love with a 
Norman heroine, a daughter of the Clares. As 
he is too poor to marry so rich a lady, he murders 
a Norman steward on the road from Gloucester, 
to get enough money to provide for the match. 
On the wedding night a fateful cry, " Dial a 
ddaw " (" Vengeance shall come "), is repeated 
thrice. They ask when vengeance will come, and 
the mysterious voice of the avenger says, " In the 
ninth generation." 



NEWTON NOTTAGE 135 

With this deferred fate the newly-married pair 
console themselves. What does it matter, when 
they will be dead long before the day of vengeance 
comes ? But Fate knows how to be equal with 
Time. They live on, far past the human term, 
and see one generation succeed another, until the 
ninth comes. Then a descendant of the murdered 
steward of nine generations before remembers the 
prediction, and, remembering, returns from Caen 
to Kenfig. That very night he notices that not 
a house or a holding in Kenfig but is held by the 
descendants of the ill-fated pair, who still survive. 
Next morning, at cockcrow, the same voice of 
Fate is heard saying " Vengeance is come ! " The 
Norman predestined to see fate accomplished, 
who has found quarters overnight in the Castle, 
goes to look for the city ; but can see only 
a great lake where it stood, and three chimneys 
near the surface of the pool giving forth a 
foul smoke that settles in a scum on the water. 
And as he watches, a pair of gloves comes 
floating to his feet, and he sees they bear the 
name and arms of the murdered man of nine 
generations before, while in heaven he hears the 
sound of many voices rejoicing, no doubt in the 
Norman tongue ! The realistic touches of the 
close — the fetid smoke, the floating gloves, com- 
plete the story as nothing else could. 

Thus Kenfig saw in its midst not only destroy- 
ing flames and the overwhelming fury of the 
sand, but also the overwhelming waters which 
legend adds to its strange domicile. 

The sand is now extensively worked, and trans- 
ported by rail for building and other purposes ; 
and many a drift has been driven into the vicinity 
of the old town. But every autumn and spring 



136 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

the winds more than make good the exported 
sand. To prevent its further encroachment, the 
tenants of the surrounding farms have to agree, 
as one of the conditions of their lease, to plant a 
certain amount of the burrows with the sand rush, 
Arundo armaria. The burrows are now used as 
a rabbit-warren, and gamekeepers are apt to 
think the amiable antiquary, in the quest of relics, 
a new kind of poacher bent on interfering with 
the " small deer." It is as well, therefore, to keep 
to the slender tracks which cross the burrows in 
all directions, lest one set one's foot in a snare. 

The last echo that history carries to us from a 
defeated and submerged Kenfig is a sinister one 
enough. Donovan, travelling through South Wales 
at the end of the eighteenth century, writes that 
" the distant tower of Kenfig church serves as 
the best guide, there being only a cart-track 
besides to depend upon. Kenfig once harboured 
a desperate banditti of lurking fellows who ob- 
tained a profitable livelihood by smuggling, the 
plunder of wrecks, &c, whom it was necessary to 
visit with caution." 

I saw no trace of smugglers, but after dark 
I heard a cheerful sound from an inn near the 
church ; like the last of the Welsh ballad-mongers 
using his art. There, by a great fire, sat two 
sand-boys, who worked in filling the sand-carts 
and wagons by day. My entering silenced them 
for a time, but after supper, when I returned 
from the parlour to the long, low chamber with 
the cavern of a hearth at its end within which 
they sat, one of them, after much pressing, began 
to sing, or rather to hum behind his pipe, a mile- 
long ballad in Welsh, which I had much difficulty 
in following. Next morning the rain was oceanic ; 



NEWTON NOTTAGE 137 

and I amused myself with a rude translation of 
what my confused memory had left of the wicked 
" Clerk of Kenfig":— 

THE CLERK OF KENFIG. 

The Clerk of Kenfig is drinking hard, — 

Drinking night and day ; 
He cannot bear the driving sand, 
Salt with the sea, wild with the wind, 

That blows from Kenfig bay. 

This night, I think, the sou'west wind 

Is worse than ever it was : 
The Clerk, — he had better pray than drink, 
For the sand might be blown from Pharaoh's land 

By a blast of the Samoon's jaws. 

It is in the church and over the graves : 

It is in at the Clerk's own door : 
He has swept it up, but what is this 
Doth spin and twine in spirals fine 

Its thin thread on the floor? 

The Clerk is afraid to go to his bed ; 

He has piled the hearth up higher ; 
But the sand comes down the chimney -louvre ; 
The grit is in his drinking-cup, 

The silt puts out the fire. 

And still he sat and still he drank 

Until the night grew old : 
And then there came a triple knock 
Upon the door, upon his heart ; 

It made his heart turn cold. 

And "Come, good Clerk," and "Come with me 1 " 

A voice said at the door : 
"This night, thou know'st, is All Saints' night: 
"The church is full, the dead-folk wait: 
"They have waited this hour and more." 



138 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Thereat he gat him up ; but when 

The Clerk undid the door, 
The sand fell in like a heavy man, 
And like a man-tall drift of snow 

Lay huddled on the floor. 

It lay there like a drunken man, 

That could not rise again : 
But what might be an angry hand 
Was at the priest, to have him out 
Into the rigid rain. 
***** 

"Stand up, good Clerk, in Kenfig church: 

"Unsay the word you said, — 
"The dead who lay beneath the sand 
' ' Should never rise at the Lord's right hand 
"At the rising of the dead! ..." 

"And Christ thee keep, thou cruel Clerk; 

And Mary in her might ; 
1 ' Around thee kneel the blessed dead : 
"And thou shalt say the Creed, and pray, 
"And preach Christ risen this night!" 

He saw them kneel, as he fear'd to see, — 

The folk of Kenfig there, — 
Yes, Roger Dunn, and Mary John, 
And the Spanish captain that was stabb'd 

By the old squire of Sker. 

He feared to see them stare on him, — 

A death's-head every one : 
But their faces gleam as they gaze on him, 
And their eyes beseech like marigolds 

That do beseech the sun. 

They stare on him, not stained with death, 

But cloth'd in white and clean ; 
Yes, white as sea-mews by the sea, 
He sees them kneel there blessedly, — 
And not a death's-head seen. 



NEWTON NOTTAGE 139 

Stand up, good Clerk ; stand up and preach 

"The Resurrection !" 
But the sand hath parched his nether lip, 
He cannot say a word nor pray : 

His grace hath from him gone. 

Yet now the Holy Rood hath found 

A voice to call them home : 
It speaks them kindly, one by one, 
And one by one, the dead are gone, 

Like sea-mews from the foam. 

The rood was bright with candle-light 

Until the last was flown ; 
The darker then the mortal dark 
That settled on the soulless Clerk 

Like the night of Babylon. 

Christ keep thy feet in Kenfig street, 

And save them in the sand, 
Where the cruel Clerk of Kenfig lies 
That did deny the dead to rise 

And sit at Christ's right hand. 



CHAPTER XIII 

MARGAM AND MARGAM PARK — THE ABBEY AND 
THE ORANGERY — MONASTIC THRIFT — OETH AND 
ANOETH — PEN DAR "THE OAK SUMMIT" 

It is but an hour's walk from Kenfig-in-the-Sands 
to Margam-in-the-Trees, but the two places might 
be leagues apart ; they are in different worlds. 
House and church at Margam are tree-sheltered, 
situate with every green favouring circumstance 
about them. The well-stocked deer-park, the lake 
that is passed on the way from the church to the 
house, and the old camp on the mound two hundred 
yards north-east of the mansion, the oak-clad moun- 
tain above, and the wooded mountain cwm, give the 
scene a wealth of verdure which at Kenfig you 
could not believe to be possible. 

The actual Abbey, however (including the old 
west front), converted into a spacious parish 
church, struck me as rather bare and much more 
impressive within than without. Externally the 
effect, as the restored portions have not had time 
to gain any softening of age, is cold. The tombs 
of the Talbot family, and in their far finer degree 
the little collection of old Celtic crosses, lend 
statuesque effect to the north and south aisles. 
There are the rich monuments too of the Mansel 
family; notably one with figured panels of 
alabaster, quaintly ornate in design. On the 

140 



MARGAM AND MARGAM PARK 141 

opposite side of the church, in the north aisle, is 
the tomb and marble effigy of one of the Talbots, 
who died young in 1883. The round-arched 
western doorway shows how fine the original 
Norman building must have been. 

John Pritchard, the Llandaff architect, says of the 
Abbey : " Like most Cistercian churches, the place 
consisted of a nave with north and south aisles, 
a central tower flanked by north and south tran- 
septs with their eastern aisles ; behind these came 
a magnificent choir with its north and south aisles, 
and in close contiguity to the south transept there 
is a superb chapter-house, in front of which was 
the large cloistered court, surrounded by the usual 
various buildings, which in general arrangement 
are said to bear a strong resemblance to those of 
Westminster Abbey. At the east end is a Norman 
central doorway, and over it three Norman 
windows. Inside, the arcades are Norman, con- 
sisting of six bays, and they occupy a space of 115 
feet, which is the limit of the existing church. 
Beyond this was the thirteenth-century church, 
with central tower and a magnificent choir, 82 feet 
long, with north and south aisles, unfortunately 
all destroyed. At right angles to the church were the 
dormitories over a length of vaulted cellarage, the 
northern end of which had a handsome vestibule 
with a fine central doorway leading from the 
cloisters to the chapter-house. Its internal 
diameter is 50 feet and circular in plan, with an 
elegant central clustered shaft, from which springs 
an elaborately groined ceiling divided into twelve 
bays." 

The chapter-house roof fell in 1799, since which 
the decay of the place has given way to continual 
restoration. 



142 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

The Orangery, on the south-west of the house, 
was built in 1770 by the father of the " Father of 
the House of Commons." It stands on the site of 
the old residence of the Rice Mansels, which had its 
orangery, too, filled with trees, and with other rare 
plants wrecked off the coast, on their way from 
Spain to the Thames. Out of doors many trees 
that love the south — bays and maples — flourish at 
Margam, owing to its protected site, in an extra- 
ordinary way. In the woods above the oak is 
king, clothing the slopes of the stream and the 
steeper hillsides. 

The name of Margam— said by some topographers 
to come from Madoc Gam, or Mawrgam, son of 
Caradoc ab Iestyn, and one of the traditional 
founders of the Abbey in 1147 — is probably 
" Morgan " only in disguise. Gerald the Welshman 
visited Margam with Archbishop Baldwin in the 
same century. A little later came King John, who 
held the place in great favour; and no doubt he 
was royally entertained. But here is Gerald's 
account of its miraculous hospitality : — 

" This monastery, under the direction of Conan, 
a learned and prudent abbot, was at this time more 
celebrated for its charitable deeds than any other 
of that order in Wales. On this account it is an 
undoubted fact that, as a reward for that abundant 
charity which the monastery had always in time of 
need exercised towards strangers and poor persons, 
in a season of approaching famine, their corn and 
provision were perceptibly by Divine assistance 
increased, like the widow's cruse of oil by the 
means of the prophet Elijah." 

There are indeed corroborating records preserved 
among the Margam Abbey charters of grants of 
seed-corn and other relief dispensed to poor neigh- 



MARGAM AND MARGAM PARK 143 

bours in time of scarcity ; but by far the larger 
number of documents relate to the ceaseless 
industry of the monks in collecting the land itself 
in return for grants of ploughs and corn. The 
monks will undertake to feed and clothe a poor 
man who has a few acres and is in " urgent need," 
and they will have his land of him in return. It is 
astonishing how much land they swept up in this 
way, and how enormously rich and powerful they 
became. Widows, it seems, were a fruitful source 
of profit : they parted with land and houses for 
small sums of ready money and the powerful 
countenance of the monastery. Poor people often 
mortgaged their land too, and there are frequent 
instances of this mortgaged land passing entirely 
over to the monks. 

It is well to keep in mind this side of monastical 
tactics without forgetting the other; the monks 
were able, learned, and prudent men ; they were 
industrious and hard-working, first-rate agricul- 
turists, the only gardeners of the time. The monks 
of Margam were, after the Romans, the only 
mineralogists ; it was they who first sought for 
and found the minerals of South Wales. Besides 
this, the monastery was the hospital and work- 
house of the district, and they comforted (an 
important point) as well as relieved the suffering 
and wayfarer. 

Gerald himself supplies us with two most naively 
told little stories, which perfectly illustrate both 
these monastic functions. 

"About the time of its foundation," says he, "a young 
man of these parts, by birth a Welshman, having claimed 
and endeavoured to apply to his own use certain lands which 
had been given to the monastery, by the instigation of the 
devil set on fire the best barn belonging to the monks, which 



144 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

was filled with corn : but immediately becoming mad, he ran 
about the country in a distracted state . . . and in a few 
days expired, uttering the most miserable complaints." 

Here is the other and handsomer side of the 
picture : — 

"In our time too, in a period of scarcity, while great 
multitudes of poor were daily crowding before the gates 
for relief, by the unanimous consent of the brethren, a ship 
was sent to Bristol to purchase corn for charitable purposes. 
The vessel, delayed by contrary winds, and not returning 
(but rather affording an opportunity for the miracle), on the 
very day when there would have been a total deficiency of 
corn both for the poor and the convent, a field near the 
monastery was found suddenly to ripen more than a month 
before the usual time of harvest ; thus, divine Providence 
supplied the brotherhood and the numerous poor with 
sufficient nourishment until autumn." 

Older memories still than those of the monks 
cling to Margam ; the ghost of a grisly old tale, 
alive since Roman times, haunts the hillside and 
the plain-land of Margam. For here, according to 
ancient history, a great battle was fought between 
Caradoc and the Romans ; and when the dogs and 
the wolves and the ravens were done with the bones, 
they lay like a white sheet over the land. Then 
Manawyddan, the son of Llyr, caused these bones 
to be gathered up (the bones of the Csesarians, he 
called them), and likewise all the Roman bones 
anywhere to be found, and he had them made into 
a great mound. For a while he reflected, gazing 
upon them (Manawyddan was a powerful wizard 
chieftain) ; then the idea came to him to have the 
bones mixed with lime and built up into a prison 
for captives taken in war, and he called it the 
Prison of Oeth and Annoeth (Power and Weak- 



MARGAM AND MARGAM PARK H5 

ness). In process of time the bones rotted, and the 
walls were pulled down and spread over the valley, 
and a great crop of wheat and barley grew up the 
next year. We can believe as much of this story 
as we like ; but one thing is certain, here is a 
theatre of wild events ; here runs the Roman road 
over hill and valley to Kenfig; and we may be con- 
fident that where Roman and Celt, Celt and Saxon, 
Celt and Norman met, there were sanguine doings. 
The Roman roads and the great Norman castle 
chain were never built to subdue an ignoble enemy. 
The climbing oaks on the mountain-side above 
Margam Park, in which the wind sometimes makes 
a noise curiously like that of hidden waterfalls, 
affirm the age of the place. The Welsh called the 
old plas in which the immemorial Morgan or 
Morcant lived after the Oak Hill, Pen Dar — that is, 
Head or Summit of the Oaks. " Derw," or " Derwen," 
the Oak Tree (" Dar," plural), is a word of force in 
Welsh tradition. You must roll the " r " well in 
speaking it, as if you really heard the wind 
roughen in the Margam oaks on the day when 
the equinoctial gale blows away the last shred 
of summer. The Welsh term for a Druid, 
"Derwydd," puts an oak-tree at once over his 
head ; he becomes a folk-lore creature like the 
Old Green Man of Gloster or Wild Man of 
the Woods. " Tir gwydd " is rough forest-land, 
land that has never been ploughed or tilled. There 
is a strange couplet in a poem of Meilir, which 
suggests that you had better know your oakwood 
before you break faith with your friends : — 

1 ' Yni f wyf gennefin a derwin wydd, 
Ni thoraf a'ni car fy ngharennydd." 
("Till I am used to the oakwood, I will not break 
friendship with my friend.") 

10 



146 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

" Yr Wyddfa," you will remember, is the wildest 
and highest crest of Snowdon. 

Two things you read in the Margam records are 
calculated to make you look back to the Kenfig 
sands, and then strain your eyes seaward for a vain 
glimpse of Lundy Island, as you climb Margam 
Hill. One is that the first serious invasion of the 
Glamorgan coast by blown sand was as early as 
the year 1384. The other was that the Abbot of 
Margam got into trouble for abusing the right of 
sanctuary. He had, in fact, given harbour to that 
desperate pirate and outlaw, William de Marisco, 
when he was ousted from his sea-eyrie in Lundy 
Island ; of whom we shall hear more when we sail 
across thither. The putting out of William de 
Marisco, with something in his pocket, from the 
Abbey gate by the too-hospitable great cleric was a 
scene to be put into drama. But you must look 
for that gateway of the Abbey in a meadow across 
the road, far from the present entrances. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE TOWN, CASTLE, ABBEY AND VALE OF NEATH — 
AN OLD TOWN — A CASTLE OF THE GR ANTILLES — 
A CISTERCIAN HOUSE — AND A VALLEY OF WATER- 
FALLS 

" From the sea they made their way towards Wales, to the 
Castle of Noeth, wandering hither and thither like convicts, 
fugitives, and daft persons." — Henry of Knighton. 

Henry of Knighton's " Castle of Noeth," or the 
Castle of Neath, was all but another lost castle 
when the modern town that seemed ready to 
swallow it up turned its protector and converted 
its ruins and last-threatened gateway into an 
urban pleasance with a charming view up the 
Vale. A good market town, Neath is still seen 
in its plenitude on a fair-day, when country 
stalls eke out the shops, and the country people, 
making an indescribable hum and gossip, crowd 
the streets ; for then the scene best recalls the 
mediaeval market held under the strong arm and 
the haughty castle-walls of the Granvilles. The 
parish church hardly lives up to the ecclesiastical 
gold and purple of Neath and Neath Abbey ; but 
it was, so far as much restoration permits one to 
say, a noble as it is still an ample building. The 
Castle, as you gaze on its towered gateway, will 

147 



148 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

strike you as very like that you saw at Llan- 
blethian ; here the surrounding houses have eaten 
up most of the walls, and seem none the better for 
it. Tramways run through the Neath streets and 
out into the black country beyond ; and one can- 
not do better, when going to Neath Abbey, than 
take the tram. But let the story of this old town 
briefly rehearse itself first. 

Neath—" Castell Nedd " in Welsh "—is the Latin 
" Nidum " of the Antoninean Itineraries, and 
formed an important station in the "via Julia 
Maritima." Then, when Fitzhamon parted the 
lands of this district, he gave the town to Richard 
de Granville, who built about the Castle and the 
Abbey, probably employing Lales as builder. The 
Castle saw some fighting at various times. In 
Stephen's reign the sons of Caradoc ab Iestyn 
attacked the town and its Norman castle, men and 
castellan, and defeated them, according to Welsh 
tradition, with frightful slaughter, three thousand 
falling in the battle. One wonders if they chose a 
market-day for the attack — a favourite time for 
castle surprises. The next overtaking was when 
Morgan Gam and Llewelyn ab Iorwerth, retalia- 
ting for Norman wrongs elsewhere, burnt the 
Castle and sacked the town, marching west from 
Kenfig. Neath obtained, through the interest of 
the De Spencers, a new charter from Edward II., 
who, as Henry of Knighton and others have 
already told us, passed through the town on his 
last unhappy Welsh journey, to be taken at Llan- 
trisant. The copper, tin, iron, and chemical works 
that give the town its modern industrial effect — 
and its smoke, alas ! — date back to the eighteenth 
century. The Corporation Seal shows a castle 
with two meaner buildings on either side, pro- 




Photo by] 



[Williams & Curnuck, Newport, Mon. 
NEATH : THE OLD CHLRCH. 



To face p. 149- 



THE VALE OF NEATH 149 

phetic, as one supposes, of its factories and foundry- 
sheds. 

The river Neath (" afon Nedd ") is tidal beyond 
the town, and navigable for the smaller kind of 
craft. At low water there were several fords in 
use before the river was bridged ; and very unsafe 
the lower ones were, if we can judge by Gerald de 
Barri's most exact account of how he and the 
Archbishop crossed this water in their role of 
spiritual knights-errant. They were on their way 
from Margam, and had a Welsh prince, Morgan ap 
Caradog, for guide ; and made the passage at the 
river-mouth, where, because of the quicksands, 
says Gerald, this is the most dangerous water to 
cross in all the South country. One of his pack- 
horses sank in the sand, and was hardly saved, 
and then only at the cost of some damage to this 
intrepid book-man's precious books. As for Gerald 
and the Archbishop, they gave up the ford after 
all, and crossed by boat. But very keenly one 
smells the salt-sand, and realises the wet shore at 
the Aber of Nedd as one reads Gerald's page. 

The water-meadows between the town and 
Castle of Neath and the Abbey were once pro- 
verbial for their greenness. Now they are a 
grimy desert. The easier way, as we said, to the 
Abbey is by tram from Howard Square ; the con- 
ductor will put you down at the old Copper- works 
crossing, where you can turn down the line to the 
gate of the Abbey. The ruin, in its extraordinary 
gloomy predicament of smoke-soiled, weather-worn 
and hopeless decay, is like nothing else in the 
countryside. Its architecture, too, is confusing at 
first, because the Hoby family converted the place 
into a Tudor seat in the year 1650. Tudor windows 
and gables are seen here and there incongruously 



150 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

wedded by the ivy to the old Norraan arches and 
parapets. The Hoby house is at the right-hand 
corner as you enter. The nave and choir of the 
church are easily recognisable ; and so are some 
of the living apartments — the abbot's lodging and 
the broken inner wall of the refectory. After the 
first melancholy of the ruins has passed from the 
explorer's mind, and a working acquaintance with 
the place and its details has been set up by an 
hour or two's investigation, he begins to restore 
the faded colours and ancient splendour of the 
magnificent picture of the Abbey by Lewis 
Morgan wg : — 

' ' Like the sky of the Vale of Ebron is its covering ; 
weighty is the lead that roofs this abode — the dark-blue 
canopy of the dwellings of the godly. Every colour is seen 
in the crystal windows ; every fair and high-wrought form 
beams through them like rays of the sun-portals of radiant 
guardians. Here are seen the gold-adorned choir, the nave, 
the gilded tabernacle work, the pinnacles ; on the glass, 
imperial arms ; on the ceiling, kingly bearings ; and on the 
surrounding border the shields of princes, the arms of Neath 
of a hundred ages ; the arms of the best men under the 
crown of Harry. The vast and lofty roof is like the spark- 
ling heavens on high ; above are seen archangels' forms ; the 
floor beneath is for the people of the earth, all the tribe of 
Babel — for them it is wrought of variegated stone. The 
bells, the benedictions, and the peaceful songs of praise, 
proclaim the peaceful thanksgivings of the White Monks." 

The White Monks were Cistercians. At the dis- 
solution of the monasteries the revenues were 
valued at £150 per annum. When the Hoby 
family gave up residence here, it fell presently 
into the state of a kind of Cadgers' Hall, and was 
allowed to run into utter neglect. At present, it 
is well cared for by the Dynevor familv, whose 



THE VALE OF NEATH 151 

property it eventually became. But all the sur- 
roundings, the wild marsh, the smoky desolation 
made by man, seem to call out for decay. 

Richard de Granville, who founded the Abbey 
about 1120, is said to have been tormented by 
remorse for his sins — we can hardly suppose by 
qualms for his sins against the Welsh, because 
those did not count for much in the Norman esti- 
mate — and his remorse, taking urgency in a mortal 
dream, led him to think of bribing the Church and 
Heaven by the truly munificent bribe of Neath 
Abbey. The Welsh name for the place, "Abbaty 
Glyn Nedd," the Abbot's House in the Vale of 
Neath, suggests that its surroundings were once 
fair enough to be ranked with the wilder natural 
beauties of a vale still famous for them. The 
effigy of Abbot Adam of Carmarthen, that used to 
lie in a field near the Abbey, is now removed to a 
safer spot in the grounds of Court Herbert. 

But the water of Nedd that goes seaward past 
the old "Abbaty" is one of the most incalculable 
of the wanton rivers of this river-shot country. 
Above the town, the stream brings one into a 
country of watery sensations and rocky surprises — 
a country of the water-fall and the water-kelpie, 
and of countless legends. Every turn of the Vale 
starts a half -forgotten folk-tale and a lurking tra- 
dition of the kind that fed the mediaeval tales with 
Welsh furmety. 

Pont Neath Vaughan is the base from which to 
explore the upper Vale of Neath and its waterfalls. 
As the name declares, it bridges the Neath (or 
Nedd), and it stands very near the confluence of 
that stream and its wild tributary, the Mellte. 
The road from Glyn Neath Station, 2± miles away, 
runs alongside the railway line on leaving that 



152 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

station for a space of two hundred yards, and then 
dodges under a railway-arch, and so makes for the 
river, which it crosses. Then, turning presently 
north, it follows the old Neath and Merthyr Canal, 
skirting Aberpergwm Park, with its pleasant hall 
standing ba«k towards the wooded hill, capped 
by Craig Llwyd. In this hillside are one or two 
shy streamlets, with rarely visited cascades, quite 
worth exploration. They may be reached by a 
rough lane, turning left at the lower end of Glyn 
Neath village, and ascending the hill. A daughter 
of Aberpergwm it was — Jane Williams — who did 
good service to Welsh music by collecting many of 
the airs in her volume of songs, and became the 
pioneer of the " Welsh Folk Song Society " that is 
now doing the same lyric service. 

Passing Aberpergwm, the road crosses the canal, 
and arrives at the Lamb and Flag Inn, an old 
coaching inn. Another turn right, and then 
another half-mile straight ahead will bring you 
to the straggling village of Glyn Neath, and so 
to Pont Neath Vaughan. Thence again the road 
zigzags through a twisted street and splits, send- 
ing one branch down to the Mellte glen and on to 
Craig-y-Dinas, while another climbs the bank on 
the main road to Ystradfellte. On the water-side 
one must not be discouraged by a brick- works nor 
the gate of a powder-works, for a footbridge leads 
thence across the stream, and turns to skirt Craig- 
y-Dinas, rock of many legends, which indeed still 
looks ominous. 

As the face of Craig-y-Dinas shows you at a 
glance, the stone has been quarried heavily in the 
last fifty years. Pictures of it as it was a century 
ago, allowing for a little artistic exaggeration, 
show a more giantesque front ; but it still looks a 






THE VALE OF NEATH 153 

strange legend-provoking monster with its lime- 
stone shoulder starting up clean-cut in the Vale. 
From above, and standing on its brink, one 
imagines a fall over it to be a dead-sure thing ; 
but a few years ago a drunken man incontinently 
fell from it, and, extraordinary to relate, recovered 
from his wounds and broken bones. 

Beneath the rock, Craig-y-Dinas, lie sleeping 
and awaiting the day of Welsh deliverance — so 
runs one of the most mysterious of all the " Sleep- 
ing Warriors " folk-tales — in a deep dreamless 
sleep, the soldiers of Owain Lawgoch. Another 
version makes the hero King Arthur himself. A 
shepherd boy (so the story goes) cut a hazel-stick 
from a tree that grew upon Craig-y-Dinas, and 
went one market-day to the town of Neath. 
There a stranger, an old wandering beggar-man 
with a staff and a long grey beard, paused as the 
boy passed by the lines of cattle, and fastening his 
eyes on the hazel-stick asked its owner where he 
got it. 

" On Craig-y-Dinas ! " answered the boy. The 
old beggar-man was seized with a trembling. 
" Take me there ! " he said, " and you shall have 
all the gold you can carry for your trouble ! So 
the boy led the old man up the vale to Craig-y- 
Dinas, and up its sides, till he came to the place 
where he had cut the hazel-wand. Close beside 
was a cleft in the limestone, and this afforded a 
narrow entrance to the top of a rude stairway, 
descending into the rock. The old man pointed 
the way, and the boy entered, and so descending 
they found their way into a dimly lit, lofty cavern, 
ten times larger than Porth-yr-Ogov. Here the 
dim light disclosed a confused array of sleeping 
soldiers with their spears and shields and breast- 



154 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

plates stacked about them. One of these stacks 
the boy in the half-darkness overturned, and the 
noise disturbed the sleepers. In their midst slept 
the chieftain, Owain of the Red Hand, and rising 
amid them he stood up, asking, " Is the day 

_ O » 

come r 

Whereupon the boy, who had been prompted 
by the Grey Beggarman, answered, " No ! — Nagyw, 
cysgwch eto ! " Cold with terror, the boy stood 
watching as the warriors, with a sigh, sank again 
into their deep slumbers. Then, remembering the 
old man's words, he seized upon a leathern bag that 
was full of golden coins and carried it off to his 
guide, who bade him quickly return for more. But 
when he would have entered the cave his hands 
struck against the damp stones. He returned then 
to ask the Beggarman what he should do. But 
night had fallen by this, and the old fellow had 
disappeared, and the boy found himself wandering 
like one bewitched on the edges of Craig-y-Dinas. 
After that night he was never able to find the 
cave again ; and so the soldiers of Owain Lawgoch 
still sleep there enchanted, waiting till the day of 
deliverance shall come, when they shall start up, 
full armed, to deliver the Cymric realm. 

One of the things which suggest that Craig-y- 
Dinas is really a bewitched place, is the fashion in 
which the two streams, Mellte and Sychnant, have 
cut their way on each side of it, with their two 
distinct glens or cwms, steep and deep, within a 
stone's throw of one another and yet divided by 
this strange buttress of limestone. Moreover, the 
Sychnant, as its name of Dry-brook tells, dispenses 
with water at the latter part of its career under 
the south-east side of Craig-y-Dinas, or commonly 
so buries it out of sight that it does not count. 



THE VALE OF NEATH 155 

A Cyclopean barrier of rocks, about three hundred 
yards from the lower end, shuts off the cwm from 
convenient exploration. The wildness of the Mellte 
is rather spoilt by the powder-mills, but indeed 
the picturesqueness of the place is mixed with 
something evil and fantastic to a degree. What 
we find at Craig-y-Dinas we find all through this 
land of unaccountable glens and innumerable 
waterfalls. 

One more Craig-y-Dinas tradition, and we are 
done with it. This story tells that the mysterious 
Welsh faery-damsel, Blodeu-wedd (or Flower- 
Aspect), who was made out of flowers and was 
converted into an owl, according to one of the 
Mabinogion, was really entombed under Craig-y- 
Dinas : that is, if Meirchion's daughter was the 
same as Blodeu-wedd, who had a fashioner, but 
no human father in the ordinary sense. 

A modern rhymer of old Welsh romances has 
put the wild forest legend of Flower-Aspect, or 
Blodeu-wedd, into a mysterious lyric : — 

THE FLOWER MAIDEN. 

"They could not find a mortal wife, 
And made him one of flowers : 
Her eyes were made of violets, 

Wet with their morning showers. 

They took the blossom of the Oak, 

The blossom of the broom, 
The blossom of the meadow-sweet, 

To be her body's bloom. 

But they forgot from Mother Earth 

To beg the kindling coal : 
They made for him a wife of flowers 
But they forgot the soul," 



156 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

The sound of falling waters is heard, resounding 
in many pitches and rough tones, from Craig-y- 
Dinas ; for there are certain small falls on the 
Sychnant within easy hail. The Sychnant swiftly 
descends from very high ground ; and a track may 
be found from the upper end of Craig-y-Dinas, 
which passes a hut and then rapidly ascends the 
hill of a thousand feet off that looks towards 
Hirwain, some five miles away, and the mineral 
highlands that lie about it. 

The Sychnant exhausted, you can, by passing 
to the left side of the tool-cabin, at the upper side 
of Craig-y-Dinas, follow a path along and well 
above the east bank of the Mellte, until you 
reach, after half an hour's going, the Hepste 
stream, which flows from the Hirwain highlands 
into the Mellte. On the Hepste, at some five 
hundred or six hundred yards above the juncture 
of the streams, are two falls — the Lower and 
Upper Cilhepste Falls. The path you are following 
will bring you to the bank of the Hepste, in the 
midst of the Lower Falls, which descend in three 
cascades. This, as we come nearer, is, after a 
heavy rain, a very definite Niagaraean roar, 
angry and profound. The fall is one of the 
finest of this series. It is peculiarly set, so as 
to afford usually a safe and dry passage right 
beneath the water. The sheer fall of the stream 
is over what would be a very respectable house- 
side — to be accurate, fifty-three feet. The foot- 
ing under its water is, except at one point, 
owing to some dislodged stone, quite safe, so 
that even timorous people need not be afraid. 
Having crossed beneath the Cilhepste Fall, you 
need not return, but can follow the path that 
bears off towards the Mellte, skirting the under- 



THE VALE OF NEATH 157 

woods, above the Hepste, with a view to the 
Clun-Gwyn Falls, passing again the Lower Hepste 
cascades on the way ; and when one of them is 
below and one above, striking off up the Mellte, 
and then down through the trees of the glen. 

The lowest, and finest, of the Clun - Gwyn 
Falls is reached in some five minutes from this 
point, and not far above the glen pool. This 
waterfall, although so differently placed from the 
Cilhepste, and not so abrupt and not nearly so 
high, is by connoisseurs thought incomparably 
finer. The pool below is haunted by a fabulous 
and monstrous fish, that cannot be caught, and 
that has the uncanny peculiarity of appropriating 
all the hooks he swallows. Keeping up stream, 
and humouring the left bank, you are brought in 
a few hundred yards to the second of the Clun- 
Gwyn Falls (it is easy, by the way, to confuse 
what appear to be short cuts across from the 
Hepste). This second, or middle, of the Falls is 
more dispersed ; but its rocks are strikingly water- 
cut and strangely fringed with trees and shrubs. 
In late autumn the colours of the trees become 
softened here to very unusual hues ; and the 
autumn rains easily convert the Mellte into a 
really imposing stream, and make these falls even 
look majestic. 

The upper Clun-Gwyn Fall is only to be ap- 
proached by some lively skirmishing, now on the 
east bank, now on the west, taking advantage of 
the latter bank, and the track skirting the fringe 
of trees above it, as far as the mouth of the upper 
of two brooks that enter the Mellte by the east 
bank. A footbridge crosses the Mellte at the 
turn above, and then the path is easy to Hendre 
Farm whence a road runs to Cwm Porth Farm. 



158 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

There a guide may be had to take you to 
the famous river cavern, Porth-yr-Ogof (Gate of 
the Cave). From Cwm Porth it is quite worth 
while to proceed on to the hamlet of Ystrad 
Fellte, after exploring the cave, which is certainly 
one of the nine wonders of Breconshire.* A couple 
of candles or a good lantern and a box of blue 
and red flares ought to form part of your equip- 
ment in exploring the cave. Otherwise not half 
its mysteries and secret recesses can be discovered, 
and the Mellte, coming out of the darkness with 
much rushing and grumbling, is no safe guide. 
The best way down into the mouth is by a track 
from the upper side. The appearance of the dry 
river-bed is uncanny, and the mouth of the cave, 
with a huge lintel that seems intended for a vast 
entrance whose lower half has been filled up, 
the issuing stream, and the general strangeness 
of the surroundings, all speak of a kind of geolo- 
gical necromancy. It is many years ago now 
since the last legend was added. A strange man 
made his way to the cave, with a gun — led by 
what sense of the sombre spirit of the place one 
can only conjecture grimly — and there shot him- 
self. His body was found eventually by a passing 
shepherd's collie-dog, and now lies in an unknown 
grave, I believe, in Ystrad Fellte churchyard. 

Once the strange portal is entered, although 
there is such ample space, the uneven pitch of 
the rocks and the irregularities natural to the 
mining of such an indefatigable mole of a river, 
make the exploration difficult. Now one is on a 

* The boundary-line of the two counties, Brecon and 
Glamorgan, was passed at Pont Neath Vaughan, and is 
denned westward by the course of the Nedd and Perddyn, 
and eastward by the course of the Sychnant. 



THE VALE OF NEATH 159 

rock, and the head of the Afanc appears, and 
now, unless one is careful, one is in danger of 
slipping over a wet stone into Peredur's pool. The 
roof is hung with linie pendants and other stalac- 
titic fantasies. On one side of the cave a side- 
passage runs off, and straitens itself in the stone. 
The whole effect of the interior is uncanny and 
unreal ; and, unless one has been accustomed to the 
interior of lead- and iron-mines, utterly bewildering. 
The further subterranean channel of the river be- 
tween the cave, where it makes its disappearance, 
and its reappearing point below, is 250 yards in all. 
It is hard to credit Iolo's story of the ten-year-old 
boy who once scrambled right through the under- 
ground tunnel. But possibly the channel at its 
exit is more choked now than used to be the case 
in Iolo's day. 

From Ystrad Fellte the turnpike leads across the 
uplands, to Pont-Felin-Fach on the Nedd River, here 
known in English as the Little Neath, and the 
Upper and Lower Nedd Falls. There you are 
within easy range of the Perddyn ; and the Perddyn 
has two falls, which are among the best in the 
district, including the Scwd Gwladys, or Lady's 
Fall. Its aspect is a little like that of the Cilhepste 
Falls, with a jutting ledge, and a space behind the 
water, sufficient only in very dry seasons, however, 
to carry you to the other side, which there is no 
object in reaching. It is a considerable pull up 
from this fall to Scwd Einion Gam, which is the 
loftiest of all the Vale of Neath falls, and quite one 
of the finest ; its setting in the rocks and trees 
is most wildly effective. 

This may seem a long diversion of the coast 
itinerary But to know a coast, you must know 
the streams too that form its abers and that have 



160 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

joined forces with the sea to carve it out. You 
watch with a sense of quickened acquaintance the 
river Nedd flow out and meet the tide, when you 
return from the two days' adventure of the valley 
of waterfalls. 



CHAPTER XV 

SWANSEA AND SWANSEA BAY — ANN KEMBLE — THE 
AUTHOR OF "TWM SHON CATTI " — LANDOR 

Swansea Bay, the bay of Walter Savage Landor's 
delight, is still one of the fairest harbours you 
can wish to see. It describes a divine curve, whose 
beauty not all the copper-smoke on its shores can 
destroy. More than half a lifetime ago the pre- 
sent chronicler spent an autumn and winter at 
Swansea ; and the place still carries traces of a 
child's fanciful town about it with exaggerated 
streets and houses. There is something, too, in 
its air, in which copper-smoke, salt-water and tar 
seem blended with the usual smells of commerce — 
a smack of antiquity that threatens to betray a 
secret at every turn. Swansea, indeed, is indi- 
vidual, as great towns go — bless its ugly face and 
dirty splendour ! It has thrust its castle into a 
backyard — a man may walk through the town 
to-day without seeing the tower above the Post 
Office. It has not found itself architecturally. 
The only really modern sign of man's handiwork is 
to be seen at the great docks, at which the last 
buttresses of the Castle stare down in wonder. Its 
churches, railway stations, public buildings, houses 
and shops, are quite unworthy of its immense 
wealth. Yet it was on the programme a century 

11 161 



162 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

ago that Swansea would be the civic queen, the 
London, of South Wales. As it is, she is content, 
it seems, to be the Cinderella : rather glorying than 
otherwise in her cinders. 

Swansea is in Welsh " Abertawe," which is more 
patent than the English name, since it places the 
town at the mouth or aber of the Tawe River. The 
name Swansea may come from Sweyn, sea-pirate 
and " Black Pagan," a Danish invader of the early 
centuries, who went down in a sea-fight off Sully. 
The other derivation from swans, or sea-swine 
(porpoises) we cannot away with. The Tawe stream 
flows down from that wildly desolate, lonely lake 
on the east side of the Van mountain, Llyn-y-fan- 
fawr, and takes a south-westerly course through 
the lower slopes until it pours itself out into 
Swansea Bay, and makes a port of Swansea town. 

If you enter the town via Landore, you accom- 
pany the river for the last and most dismal part of 
its course. Emerging then from the Great Western 
station, you can turn down High Street, following 
the trams ; at its foot Castle Street continues 
the thoroughfare, suddenly contracted at this 
point. At the lower end of the next narrow 
stretch of street you reach the old centre of the 
town, whose heart and head were its Castle and 
Castellan. Two different sets of Post Office build- 
ings have eaten up part of the Castle site, but 
some of the old walls may be seen behind it. A 
small second-hand book-shop (where you can pick 
up rare Welsh books), near the gates of a wheel- 
wright's yard, may help to direct you to the north 
side of the ruin. Thence the Castle extended for 
a space of seventy yards originally, northward 
behind what is now Worcester Place, and south- 
ward along Castle Square, commanding, because of 



SWANSEA AND SWANSEA BAY 163 

its position above the riverside, the whole waterway 
and network of the great North Dock. 

One afternoon David and I turned in at the 
lower entrance of the Castle yard, and were gazing 
at the walls and wondering how to get into the 
Tower, when an ancient dame appeared on the 
scene. We followed her up an outer flight of 
steps, but she did not offer much encouragement 
to explorers. 

" The stairs," she explained to us, " were thick to 
your ankles with dirt and dust, and some of the 
steps were gone so bad you couldn't go up to the 
top. The Duke of Bewfort [Beaufort] couldn't 
bear having the old place touched — ' don't ye so 
much as lay a finger on it,' he said." 

A most unseemly sort of midden lay below, full 
of ashes and refuse. David asked her if the Duke 
would not have that touched either? 

" No," she said, with a confidential change of 
tone ; " he will not have the old place touched, 
His man once went to lime that wall, and the Duke 
was very vexed at his doing it : ' Never you do such 
a thing again ! ' No, he will not have a finger lifted 
in the old place. Some say he wants to come and 
live in it himself ! " 

I did not like to observe that there was a mean 
between whitewashing the old walls and keeping 
the dirt out ; for we wished to conciliate her, and 
prove we did not mind the dust on the Tower stair. 
Finally, grumbling some last objections, she went 
for a key, and let us into a match-boarded room 
hung from end to end with bits, bridles, saddles, 
and other trappings of the 1st Glamorgan Terri- 
torials. This helped to bring back something of 
the military illusion of the fortress. A small door, 
and a dark winding stair within it, led on from this 



164 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

chamber ; and our guide supplied a long wax 
taper to light us up — a very necessary weapon, as 
it proved. She adjured us to be sure and look 
through a hole at a stage half-way up, when we 
heard a noise like a jackdaw, to see the mighty 
works of the old town clock. Evidently for her 
this was the wonder of the Castle. We heard the 
clock, just as she had said, and we gazed eagerly 
through the crevice into the small chamber whence 
the noise came, but saw no such spectre or double 
of a long-imprisoned clock-maker as the noise 
seemed to promise. Some further stumbling rounds 
of the dark staircase, and we passed a door and 
parapet ; and a last dark flight and ladder led out 
into a kind of crow's nest with a dismantled rusty 
crown-piece filling nearly the whole of it. From 
this perch the sudden spectacle of the wealthy and 
dirty capital of Glamorganshire was to be seen in 
one confusing orbit in the afternoon sun. 

The far-spread enginery and long lines of the 
docks and great ships came first ; then part of a 
street, a bit of timber-yard, the roof of a new 
hotel, a pretentious draper's palace, a bleak hill 
with a row of poor houses half-way up it, a corner 
of a slum, and many belching chimneys, all pitched 
together in an extraordinarily affecting disorder, 
so that one wished for a Meryon's genius and 
etching-needle to record it. Beyond all lay the 
curved bay, of a bright azure in the sun : like an 
angel in a blue robe asleep on the brink of a cinder- 
heap. All the materials for a great city were here, 
but in what a state of neglect and chaos ! 
***** 

Swansea Castle, since the days of Beauchamp de 
Newburgh, when it was built, has kept but a 
meagre account of its sieges and sallies. The 



SWANSEA AND SWANSEA BAY 165 

need for such a fortress arose when the Normans 
decided to hold Gower, and saw that a few links 
more must be added in the district to the lengthen- 
ing chain of castles. Swansea Castle was on the 
whole lucky in the Welsh sieges that followed. 
In 1113 Griffith ap Rhys, and in 1192 Rhys ap 
Griffith, invested it : in both sieges Welsh quarrels 
saved it. Gower was raided from end to end, 
during more than one of the assaults on Swansea 
Castle ; Swansea town was ransacked and burnt 
more than once when the Castle escaped. 

One of the first things to strike the invader of 
the Castle to-day is the likeness of the little 
parapet arches to those of the Bishop's Palace 
ruins at St. David's. They were built, in fact, by the 
same builder, Bishop Gower, about the year 1342. 
Previously to that the Castle had had some hard 
knocks ; and its most famous captain, William de 
Braos, contriving to offend the King, was obliged 
to leave it and fly to France, where, tradition says, 
he died. When his kinsman, Giles, Bishop of Here- 
ford, held it, that is in 1215, Llewelyn the Great 
assailed it in force, and appears to have over- 
thrown it with many of its dependent castles in 
the Gower castelry. " In Swansea," sang Llywarch 
ab Llewelyn — 

"In Swansea, that peaceless place, 
The castle- walls are rent ; 
A peace, like death, prevails. 

In Swansea, that strong-walled fort, 
The Key of England, the Saxon is slain ; 
All the women are widows ! " 

The Castle changed owners many times, the 
De Braos family often appearing as its lords. But 



166 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

in 1324-1325 it passed into the De Spencers' hands ; 
and then for a last tinie, and for only a short time, 
to the heirs of the De Braos' house, the De Mow- 
brays. Owain Glyndwr was the only Welshman 
who assailed it with any success after its rebuilding 
by Bishop Gower ; but he did not seriously damage 
the actual structure. In 1470 we find a charter 
allotting the Castle (with Oystermouth and Kilve) 
to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke ; and an 
heiress of that stock carried it then over to the 
Beaufort family, its present owners. During the 
Civil War it saw some fighting again, and for the 
last time. A local historian can tell us the tale : — 

"There is a libellous tradition that it was taken and 
retaken three times within the same day, and no blow struck 1 
but this is only a malicious invention. At some time in its 
history there must have been hard fighting and slaughter 
here, for when the foundations of the Post Office were dug 
in the Castle precincts, no less than fifteen skeletons were 
found in a very small area. Walter Thomas was the Governor 
in the King's interest, and Colonel Philip Jones succeeded to 
the command of the garrison on behalf of the Parliament, 
when Oliver Cromwell was 'Lorde of this towne.' On the 
3rd March, 1647, it was ordered by Parliament 'thatSwanzey 
Castle be dis-garrisoned, and the works slighted.' Later on, 
the fortress, probably then much dismantled, suffered the 
indignity of being let to Matthew Davis, a local Roundhead, 
for 99 years, at £2 per annum." 

There the record may end. 

Leaving the Castle, and continuing your way 
then to the lower town, you can go down Wind 
Street to gain the older shipping purlieus. There, 
at the point where the railway bridge and its 
iron girders cross the street, groups of sailors 
standing about remind you how large a part 
the seafaring life plays at Swansea. 



SWANSEA AND SWANSEA BAY 167 

One morning, when we had missed a train at 
the London and North-Western station, David 
beguiled me into a tour of the older docks. There 
he contrived to strike up acquaintance first with 
a ship-painter who was painting the footbridge 
over the dock-gates, and then with a friendly " hen 
wraig," clad in the true Glamorgan style — double 
gown and petticoat, and thick flat-straw hat with 
frilled border, who sold black lavar-bread and 
cockles on the quayside. He boarded next a 
French barque, the Demoiselle of Bordeaux, and 
discoursed queer French to the captain. 

To all which the captain smiled and responded 
in easy-going English, " Take a look over her, 
my boy, and welcome, but excuse me, as 1 have 
to run up town ! " 

In that circuit of a single pool, the smaller of 
the Swansea docks, we saw, as if they had been 
got for a museum, nearly every kind of vessel 
that has sailed water from the day of Nelson 
onward. Coasting vessels like the Pierre of Bor- 
deaux, the Jean of Roscoff, the Polly and the Lucy 
Smith, and great steam-vessels like the Duke of 
Wellington. Around us the warehouses and 
wharves gave out mixed odours of spice and 
grain, and the water provided others, not easy 
to analyse, not over sweet, yet remarkably smack- 
ing of the salt sea. 

It surprises one to turn suddenly amid these 
shipping places and to spy the Royal Institution, 
whose colonnade, seen in this unexpected seafarer's 
place, gives a classic air to the street that leads 
on to the South Dock. 

Entering the place, we found on the staircase 
some interesting old pictures, a portrait of Sir 
Hans Sloane (of Sloane Museum fame), one or 



168 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

two portraits of gentlemen in armour or in scarlet, 
a Dutch classic piece by Jordans, and many prints 
and documents tinged with Swansea antiquity. 
Among these was to be discovered the veritable 
marriage deed or contract of affiance between 
Edward II., then Prince of Wales, and Isabel, 
daughter of Philip IV. of France, dated May 20, 
1303. We know how the story of these two ill- 
mated people ended, and the disaster that the 
weakness of the one, and the over-weening 
strength and ambition of the other, " the she- 
wolf of France," helped to invoke. It was, in fact, 
due to its tragic ending that this document in 
the case came to be left at Swansea. Edward, 
flying to Wales from his fate, waited at Swansea, 
hoping, as one story tells, to get a vessel and cross 
to France. But either no vessel was forthcoming, 
or Swansea grew too hot for safety, and Edward 
turned back in haste to Neath, leaving behind 
him all the impedimenta he could not safely 
carry away. Long afterwards a small oak chest 
containing this and other documents was handed 
over to a Swansea doctor by some poor people 
who could not pay his doctor's fees. Probably 
it had been lying in the garret or cellar of one 
of the queer tenements that filled the Swansea 
slums at the time this transaction took place. 

In the cases upstairs will be found stones and 
fossils that were privy to the making of the 
coal measures and of the rocks that give the 
Glamorganshire scenery its individuality. Here, 
too, are the broken relics of the Bone Cave, Bacon 
Hole, Paviland, and others in Gower, which ought 
to be well scrutinised before you go thither. 
Among the cave-creatures whose bones are to 
be seen are the rhinoceros, elephant, bear, wolf, 



SWANSEA AND SWANSEA BAY 169 

hyena, badger, polecat, red deer, and buffalo. 
The "Red Lady of Paviland" may have seen 
these creatures in the flesh ; but she keeps her 
own counsel. In another room some of the 
strange fish that have swum into Swansea Bay 
may be found surviving their day — whale, sea- 
devil, sun-fish, shark ! And in another room are 
coins, traders' tokens, old seals, found in the 
district. Here, dryly observes the best of familiar 
historians, " here also are mummies, the key of 
Oystermouth Castle, and a cast of the head of 
Ann of Swansea." 

Poor Ann of Swansea ! She still haunts the 
fancy of the sentimental tourist as he wanders 
through Swansea to-day and catches sight of 
the bay, remembering her lament : — 

"The restless waves that lave the shore, 
Joining the tide's tumultuous roar, 
In hollow murmurs seem to say : 
'Peace is not found in Swansea Bay.'" 

Ann deserves her niche in the gallery because 
she was one of the few modern romance-writers 
who have lived and died in Wales. Her stories 
are forgotten, all save that of her own strange 
life. " Ann of Swansea " was one of the Kembles, 
sister to John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons. After 
an unfortunate marriage to a scamp (who deceived 
her, being married already) she was only rescued 
from the extreme of poverty by her richer rela- 
tions. Then, in 1792, she married a Mr. Hatton, 
and went with him to New York. Returning to 
England, after an absence of eight years, they 
settled in Swansea, and kept for five years the 
" Bathing House," an hotel and house of assembly. 



170 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

This did not succeed. On the death of Mr. Hatton, 
in 1806, his wife went to Kidwelly, and, notwith- 
standing her lameness, kept a school for dancing 
and deportment. In 1809 she writes again from 
Swansea, where she continued to reside, at No., 15, 
Park Street, on an income of £90 a year, allowed 
by her relatives until her death in 1838. She lies 
buried in the St. Mary's New Cemetery, behind St. 
John's Church, but no one knows the precise spot. 
She wrote three volumes of poems and some 
fifteen or sixteen novels, one of which, The 
Chronicles of an Illustrious House, created a 
ferment in Swansea because of its local allusions. 
A photograph from a picture of Ann of Swansea 
is in the Deffett-Francis Collection in the Art 
Gallery. 

Another more original tale-teller than Ann 
of Swansea was that eccentric creature, I. J. 
Llewelyn Prichard, the author of Twin Shon 
Catti, who wrote, too, in his Heroines of Welsh 
History a brief biography of Maud de Haia, 
Moll Walbe, of Hay Castle and Swansea Castle. 
Prichard spent the latter part of his life at 
Swansea, not very happily, I fear. Local gossip 
has it that he was derided by little boys and the 
vulgar " on account of his artificial nose, which 
was kept in its place by his spectacles. He fell 
asleep one day over his books in his poor lodging 
at Thomas Street, and his death was accelerated 
by the burns he got from his clothes and papers 
taking fire." Besides Twin Shon Catti he 
wrote much on Welsh subjects, and everything 
he wrote was written with a certain queer force 
and whimsicality, shown alike in his way of 
seeing things and in his way of putting them. 

Twm Shon Catti he described as "the first 



SWANSEA AND SWANSEA BAY 171 

attempted thing that could bear the title of a 
Welsh novel." He was led to attempt it by the 
success of an absurd play in London, played at 
the Coburg Theatre, called — 

TWM JOHN CATTI ; 
Ob, "The Welch Rob Roy." 

"This second title," he says, "which confounded 
the poor Cambrians, was a grand expedient of the 
dramatist to excite the attention of the Londoners, 
who naturally associated it with the hero of the 
celebrated Scotch novel ; the bait was immediately 
swallowed. Great was the surprise of the sons 
of the Cymry to find their practical joker, Twm 
Shon Catti, elevated to the degree of a high- 
hearted injured chieftain, uttering heroic speeches 
and ultimately dying for his Ellen a hero's death." 

The play was based directly on a tale in a queer, 
half-humorous volume called The Inn-Keeper s 
Album, and published in 1823. " Twm John 
Catty : the Welch Rob Roy " is much the longest 
and absurdest story in the book, written in mock- 
heroic prose and in defiance of time and history. 
The characters are of all ages : " Owen Glendower " 
appears by the side of " Twm John." Twm himself, 
invincible by men, has to be got rid of by light- 
ning. Prichard's Welsh wit was revolted by this 
stage-travesty of Twm, converted into a paste- 
board hero. Fielding, teased by the sentimental 
art of Richardson's Pamela, turned to Joseph 
Andrews, and this anti-romancer wrote his 
humorous novel of Twm Shon Catti in protest 
against a high-falutin play. 

Prichard wrote a book of poems, too, which was 
published by Leigh Hunt and his brother John in 



172 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

1824. It is nothing like so original as his tale- 
writing ; but the longest poem, " The Land Beneath 
the Sea," has a fine subject, the drowning of the 
" Cantref-y-Gwaelod " or Bottom Hundred, and 
some fine passages. One of these bears quoting 
in the account of the drowning of the " Cantref " ; 
but the absurd two lines that stick in the ear 
persistently, out of Prichard's Welsh Minstrelsy, 
are printed on the title-page : — 

"Oh, list to the minstrel who sweeps the Welsh telyn, 
Hear, hear ye the harpings of Jeffery Llewelyn ! " 

Prichard seems to have at one time gone touring 
in South Wales with some theatrical " fit-up " com- 
panies ; and one cannot help wondering if he in his 
function of stage-manager also produced a version 
of " Twm Shon Catti." His own history, could one 
but recover it, would be as entertaining as any- 
thing he invented. The date of his death is given 
by Asaph in the Dictionary of Eminent Welshmen 
as 1874 ; but the third edition of Twm Shon 
Catti, 1871, mentions his death at about a year's 
remove. 

Walter Savage Landor spent three of the most 
precious years of his life between Swansea and 
Tenby. His first book of poems had been published 
in London by T. Cadell and W. Davies in 1795, and 
not long afterwards he seems to have left London 
for South Wales on an allowance of a hundred and 
fifty pounds a year. He led for the most part a 
very solitary life : 4 I lived chiefly among woods 
which are now killed with copper works and took 
my walks over sandy sea-coast deserts then covered 
with low roses and thousands of nameless flowers 
and plants trodden by the naked feet of the Welsh 



SWANSEA AND SWANSEA BAY 173 

peasantry and trackless." If this is true of his 
lonely days, it is certain that he found the friends 
a young poet looks for. His earliest Welsh love 
he called lone, which was his poetic rendering of 
Jones : — 

"lone was the first; her name is heard 
Among the hills of Cambria, north and south, — 
But there of shorter stature, like herself ; 
I placed a comely vowel at its close 
And drove an ugly sibilant away." 

He found other loves in Wales, one Irish, whom 
he called Ianthe, and one English, Rose Aylmer — 
whom he met at Tenby. It was Ianthe who lent 
him the book, a history of romance by Clara 
Reeve, in which he found the Arabian tale that 
struck him by its sombre antique splendour. Gebir 
is the same root as Gibraltar, and the story is 
Spanish and Moorish ; but the colour in it, we may 
be inclined to decide, is partly Welsh. He began 
to write it in Latin as Geberus ; but returned to 
English. Then, wandering in North Wales over 
the grouse-moors near Bala : — 

"Above the lakes, along the lea 

Where gleams the darkly yellow Dee ; 
Through crags, o'er cliffs," 

he bore his precious verses with him and there 
contrived to lose them. Some months later they 
found their author again at Swansea : — 

"When over Tawey's sands they came 
Brighter flew up my winter flame, 
And each old cricket sang alert 
With joy that they had come unhurt." 



174 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

He was under the influence of Pindar and 
Milton, two powerful demons (as Blake would say), 
when he wrote Gebir, and the style is often Mil- 
tonic, and sometimes great. No doubt it has 
Landor's noble defects ; it is writ in marble, and 
the rhythm is stiff and wants variety. But it was 
a great poem for a boy of twenty to write. It can 
be best read, not continuously but in episodes, as 
one walks the shore of Swansea Bay, where many 
of its close-compacted pages were written. 









CHAPTER XVI 

PIRATES' ISLAND — LUNDY— MARISCO'S CASTLE — 
BENSON'S CAVE— THE DEVIL'S LIMEKILN — 
AMYAS LEIGH 

One of the finest sea-sensations on or off the 
British coast is to be had at Lundy, which lies 
within a couple of hours' steam of Swansea. I 
first saw the island in June, when daybreak begins 
before 3 a.m., and we did not take the shortest 
passage, but set sail early from the Mumbles Pier 
on the Welsh side of the Channel. A fair westerly 
breeze cleared off the last of the rain as we started, 
and the colours of the Glamorgan hills grew vivid 
all around the superb curve of Swansea Bay — the 
bay of Landor's delight. We did not sight Lundy 
till just upon noon, for we had a long tack to make 
in order to call at Ilfracombe. We were followed 
all the way, I remember, by a single gull that 
seemed to keep itself poised exactly above the 
jackstaff at the stern. Its only mate was a canary 
whose cage hung in the foc'sle. That bird never 
saw the sea, but the gull must have heard the 
creature's incessant indoor shrilling. 

As we neared Lundy, a darker sky and a threa- 
tening squall made the line of cliffs look angry and 
sepian. Before we got into closer quarters the sun 
was out again, and what had seemed all granite 

175 



176 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

changed into grassy steeps and fern slopes, ending 
in a sheer drop at one-third of their height. But 
round the anchorage, beneath the jutting Lametor 
— a peninsula of precipices — where now the new 
lighthouse stands, and the opposite cliffs, all was so 
shut in and so steep that one was puzzled to know 
how one could get up to the roof of the island. 
We put off in a boat to the beach, for there is no 
proper ship-landing, and there we were met by a 
whiff of warm, perfumed air, smelling of sun- 
heated bracken — an air that hardly belonged to 
this pirate-cove, where everything ought to reek 
of tar and sea-salt. From this cove it is a sultry 
climb in the June sun, and one is glad to leave the 
wearisome road at the first chance and zigzag off 
by a hanging by-path, which makes a short cut to 
Marisco's Castle. The present lord of Lundy, the 
Rev. Mr. Heaven, has a much more sheltered 
stronghold in a cwm lying at the first angle inland 
above the Lametor Cove. 

As for Marisco, there is no space here to tell half 
his story — with a suspected murder of his in a 
London street to begin it. It is enough that, 
flying from justice or injustice, he took refuge in 
Lundy. We have already heard of him at Margam, 
whose abbot got into trouble for sheltering him 
and giving him sanctuary there. Matthew Paris 
gives us the best picture of him, and relates how he 
took up his eyrie here in a place inexpugnable, and 
being exlex and King's traitor, proceeded to live 
more pyratico. William de Marisco had, indeed, 
seen a good deal of castle-building in Ireland 
(where his father, Geoffrey, built the castles of 
Killaloe and Ballyleague), and the plain square 
keep of the Castle — all that is left of it — which he 
built to be his stronghold on Lundy, still shows 



PIRATES' ISLAND 177 

how good a builder he could be. To-day you open 
a door in the thick wall of the keep, to feel 
bewildered at what it discovers. For the interior 
is filled with three or four small whitewashed 
cottages, which make it into a snug alley, just such 
as you may see in the heart of some crowded city. 
Step outside the door again, and sea and sky, and 
the lonely island hung between them, are all your 
world. Marisco was the right, rare spirit to har- 
bour here, and live by the strong hand. He raided 
the ships that sailed up the Sea of Severn, and all 
the neighbouring coasts from Bideford on the one 
side to Porthkerry and Aberthaw on the other. 
His name grew to smell of fire and blood ; he was 
so strong in his island that none dared attack him. 
But then, the King pressing for his capture, some 
of the men of Devon and Glamorgan seem to have 
combined, and by a ruse effected what they could 
not do by open assault. Paris tells us of the 
strategy ; but does not say what it was. Anyhow, 
he was taken, carried to London, and there died, 
says Paris, not one but many horrible deaths — 
a statement which sufficiently hints at the hideous 
ignominies his dead body was made to suffer. 

At his trial not only his piracy on the British 
coasts and the high seas (which he admitted), and 
the murder of the Irish messenger in the London 
streets (which he stoutly denied), were charged 
against him ; but he was accused of high treason of 
a more heinous kind. Two or three years before 
this a certain fantastic esquire had found his way, 
it seems, to Woodstock, when the Court was there, 
and, feigning madness, entered the King's bed- 
chamber by the window, carrying "a naked knife." 
Luckily one of the Queen's maids, Margaret Biseth 
by name, was a devote, and was singing psalms by 

12 



178 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

the light of a candle, and she spied this unhal- 
lowed fly-by-night, and gave the alarm. He was 
taken, said he was a paid assassin, and William 
Marisco his master I There seems to have been 
nothing to prove his story true ; but any stick is 
good enough to hit a pirate. So the unhappy lord 
and king of Lundy was sentenced to death, and 
many of his desperate heroes along with him. He 
was hung, says Paris sententiously, on that penal 
machine called vulgarly a gibbet, and his body dis- 
honoured, disembowelled, and quartered. Last sign 
of his ill-fame, the four quarters were sent to four 
chief cities of the realm as a warning. And so 
Marisco the Pirate became a reproach in York and 
a ballad-singer's theme as far away as the Borders. 
He died — his chronicler wrote — not in grace, but 
after a manner which sounds like an imaginative 
rendering of a doom after death, wrought by many 
tortures. 

One of the caves used for hiding loot — "Benson's 
Cave" it is called — lies close below the Castle. 
Benson was a much later islander than Marisco 
— a humorous villain who, pretending to ship 
convicts oversea, landed them here, stored his 
ship's cargo in this cave, scuttled his ship, and 
by this and kindred methods was rapidly amass- 
ing a huge fortune, when the authorities harshly 
interfered. He escaped abroad then, and died, 
no doubt, a happy death. But Bideford, where 
he was born, makes little of his memory. 

There are other caves in Marisco's Isle, just as 
satisfying to one's appetite for pirates and 
buccaneers. There is the Devil's Kitchen, in 
which the arch-enemy is sometimes seen in the 
shape of a bull-seal, who can, when he leaves its 
shelter, throw stones like any Christian boy. 



PIRATES' ISLAND 179 

Best or worst of all, there is that uneasy chasm 
— the Devil's Limekiln — over against the jags 
and crags at the south-west corner of the island. 
On a dry day in a dry season you had needs 
take care how you clamber down to its verge. 
It is as ill a place as you could wish to stare 
into, and the Shutter Rock is its ominous 
offspring. It would, if you could replace it in 
the Limekiln cavity (whence, they say, the Evil 
One first took it), exactly fit it. You need a 
good boatman if you would explore the Limekiln 
cliffs and the sea-caves from the sea. But for 
a perfect cave adventure you must boat at low 
tide to the north end of the island. There lies a 
superb seal-cave with three entrances, into which 
your boat can carry you. It is a magic cave, 
too ; for its dimensions vary according to every 
explorer and I prefer not to give any. 

If, however, being a day excursionist from 
Ilfracombe, you explore this end of the island 
and boat round the " Hen and Chickens," and 
penetrate this triple cave, you will assuredly lose 
your return steamer home, and so be left at the 
mercy of the uncanny, sudden fogs, and the 
tricky, shifting winds that often help to cut off 
the island from the mainland. It is a simpler 
matter to know the inhabited human end of 
Lundy, where its squire and his small tenantry 
are quartered. A country house in a cwm, with 
a garden below ; a new church on the high 
ground, clean-walled, erect, alert, like a light- 
house or an architect's drawing ; three or four 
cottages, and a manor farm, where you can stay ; 
these are almost all the human furniture. Bleak 
as is the island, small herbs abound there, and 
blossom long before those of the mainland. 



180 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Purple ling is in bloom early in June, far ahead 
of its season, but the universal carpet of the sea- 
links is lady's slipper — an innocent herb for a 
pirate's foot to tread. Seapink, blue scabious, 
and many flowering lichens abound, too ; and 
above them, like snippets of sky, the blue 
fritillaries are busy, flying over the slopes, and 
reminding us that though Lundy is nearer 
Devonshire than Glamorganshire, its wild flowers 
and its other creatures all take after those on 
the Welsh side of the Channel. Add to this 
that Lundy has the peregrine falcon, the great 
cormorant and sea-pie among its birds, and that 
on the Lametor and Rat Island adjoining is one 
of the last refuges of the true black rat — the 
brown rat having appropriated the main island. 
Another race of creatures, more elusive than 
the black rat, may be believed in or not, as you 
like, in Lundy. The Welsh name for the place 
was once " Ynys Wair," Isle of Gwair, and in a 
poem in the Book of Taliesin we read of the 
prison of Gwair in Caer Sidi. The combination 
of names has led Sir John Rhys to the conjecture 
that it was, or may have been, in Lundy itself 
that Caer Sidi and " Carchar Gwair " were situate. 
Two mysterious accounts of the Caer of the 
Sidi, or faery fort, are to be found in the same 
book, in the xivth and in the xxxth poem. The 
former says of it: — 

1 ' Seemly is my seat in Caer Sidi : 
Neither age nor plague for him that liveth there ; 
As Manawyddan and Pryderi know, 
Three organs play before the fire there : 
And around its corners the ocean currents go." 

This brings up the idea again of the Isle of 



PIRATES' ISLAND 181 

Youth, the Emain or Avalon, that haunted the 
Celtic imagination late and early. Had the 
unlucky Edward II., when he thought of flying 
there in his last hurried escape along the Welsh 
coast, heard in Gwent something of its old 
repute as a refuge for unhappy souls and out- 
laws — " the impregnable isle " as Walsingham 
calls it ? 

He never reached its haven, it is certain, 
drifting instead to his fate, to be captured near 
Llantrisant. I saw none of the Sidh or fairy 
folk, at Lundy, nor did I spy a seal. But I am 
sorry to say I did see a seal-gun on its rack in 
the island inn; for surely it is a grand mistake 
to shoot seals at all, now that they are growing 
scarcer year by year on the British coasts. To 
see a seal dive in a sea gully on the west coast 
of Pirate's Isle must be a sight to remember. 
There the boulders, that are dun or grey out of 
the water, look when seen within its clear depth 
of a true mermaid colour; they look now like 
mermaids, now uncannily like so many naked, 
drowned men. It is not hard to understand, if 
one sits (as Kingsley made Amyas Leigh sit in 
his blindness) against the Gull Rock, and sees 
thence the rocks and the weeds "beneath the 
merry blue sea," how he came by that episode. 
Indeed, for romance and lost galleons and buried 
hoards of " pieces-of -eight," no Indian isle can 
beat Lundy — that rib of granite which lies snug 
but deadly in the Sea of Severn ; a harbour of 
refuge or a shipbreaker, according to which side 
you take of it. 

We reached Lundy, as I have told, in a hot 
sun ; we left its pirate cove in a cold rain, to 
the first mutterings of a nasty wind in the 



182 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Lametor crags. We had not sailed above three 
or four furlongs before Marisco's Isle had dis- 
appeared ; and we got back home that evening 
and saw the gas-lamps lit in the street, with a 
sense of having been in a place just a little over 
the world's rim. 






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CHAPTER XVII 

THE EAST GOWER COAST — THE MUMBLES, OSTRE- 
MUERE AND PENNARD — MORGAN, QUEEN OF THE 
LAND OF GORE — " DRAB A AIZOIDES " 

' ' I am the Queen Morgan le Fay, 
queen of the land of Gore." 

"Morte D'Arthur." 

Leaving the last of the Swansea suburbs at 
Sketty, and then striking across Clyne Moor for 
Bishopston, or taking the more usual route by 
the lazy Mumbles railway, you will find a change 
of entertainment in the land of Gore. There is 
a choice of castles, to say nothing of the Bone 
Caves and smugglers' " runs," the endless creeks or 
"slades," and the cliff architecture above them. 

Oystermouth Castle, better than the fragments 
of Swansea, recalls the hold of the castle-builders 
in the country. Apparently the first of the 
string of Gower fortresses tied to Swansea Castle, 
" Ostremuere " afterwards became more important 
than Abertawe. As you see it now, you see it 
much altered from its original state. The first 
castle was burnt in the eighteenth century, when 
the present one was built in its place. Hence, 
the ornamental character of some of the win- 
dows, which in one instance, that in the chapel, 
show fine tracery, of a convolute pattern (restored 

183 



184 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

some thirty years ago). The Castle is apparently 
eccentric in design, but well adapted to its site 
and polygonal in form, with no show of sentinel- 
towers beyond the gate-tower and the keep. The 
keep is the only part of the original castle now 
remaining. As you enter the gate, and regarrison 
the place in your record, one castellan stands out 
clearly, and it is the figure again of William 
de Braos, " Breuse sance Pite." Having already 
twenty castles and more at his back, he made 
" Ostremuere " his dungeons-in-chief, where he 
cast those contumacious Welsh and other trouble- 
some neighbours who did not subscribe to his 
plans, or help to feed his house and estate. At 
the opening of the fourteenth century he was a 
multiple Lord Marcher and castle-owner, whose 
powers were so superlative that at last they 
intoxicated him. He held in all some fifty-nine 
lordships, and King John in the early years of 
his reign gave to him the whole of Gower, on 
terms of only one knight's service. His wife, 
Maude de Haia, was a fit mate for him. While 
he passed as a symbol of cruelty, murder, and 
rapine into the later Arthurian tales, she became 
in Welsh folk-lore a gorgeous witch, a Morgan 
le Fay, a giant- woman of giant strength. She 
was overwhelmingly haughty in her bearing ; 
without any woman's weakness ; physically with- 
out fear. Their children were of the same build 
with themselves, and had the same Norman grip, 
in accordance with the couplet — 

Les Normains ont les mains crochus ; 
C'est le mieux ramasser tout." 

(The Normans have the hands crook'd so, 
The better to clutch all, you know.) 



THE EAST GOWER COAST 185 

But enough has been said of the De Braoses 
already. Another witch-woman, her fellow- 
enchantress, who still enchants and tantalises 
one here on the threshold of Gower, is the old 
Queen of Gore. There are more regions of 
Morgan le Fay than one, but it is as certain as 
anything in romance that Gower is their Welsh 
original. The "land of Gore" suggests a land of 
witches, approached as it is through a valley of 
desolation, the dreadful valley of Landore (which 
Morgan le Fay might easily have devised and 
set there by black-magic as a barrier to her 
dominions). It is strange that King Mark in 
his rage against Tristan and his cousin Alisander 
should have sent to Morgan le Fay and another 
queen, "praying that they two sorceresses 
would set all the country in fire with ladies 
that were enchantresses " and dangerous knights 
like Malgrin and Breuse sance Pite, for the reek 
of that fire still hangs dreadfully over Landore. 

But at the Mumbles you have left the copper- 
smoke far behind. The time to climb the Mumbles 
Hill is late on a summer evening, when the tide 
is full and the sun westering. But by broad 
moonlight on a clear night the bay looks just 
as fair : if the sea-surroundings are not so distinct, 
the furnace-glow on the left is mysterious to see. 
Seen by day, the view ranges along the Glamorgan 
coast, beginning with the superb curve of Swansea 
Bay, and traversing the mouths of the rivers 
Tawe and Neath, and scanning the smoke-cloud 
of Swansea town and the dolorous valley of 
Landore. Past Port Talbot, the view just skirts 
the sands of Kenfig, with Porthcawl and Nash 
Point all but lost to view in the coast perspec- 
tive ; over the Channel the heights of Exmoor 



186 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

and, further east, the Quantocks are visible. 
Nearer home, on the other hand, some familiar 
points of the Gower coast are quite hidden, 
while others stand out and look as if they were 
within a stone's throw. This is, to adopt a triad, 
one of the Three great vistas of this southern 
coast. 

One uncertain April morning I started with 
Mercury from Oystermouth to Pennard Castle. A 
pelting shower on the first steep hill drove us under 
the ivy of a high wall for shelter; the rest was 
all bright windy weather, with blue and white 
skies, and dry, white roads such as you get in 
limestone country. 

Outside Norton, we overtook a big herd-lad 
driving the proverbial three cows. They were 
three sisters ; the first eight, the second seven, the 
third six years old : sleek, brown and dun animals, 
Alderney and Shorthorn crossed. The lad was 
fond of the creatures, and proud of their cross- 
bred qualities. " They were good milkers, or 
fairly good," he said, much better than your pure 
Alderneys. " An Alderney is not worth her salt " 
was a common saying among the Gower farmers. 

Next we dropt into the deep valley of Bishopston, 
and went to see the church. The churchyard 
looked still enough as we went in ; still as graves can 
be. But suddenly, from near the wall and behind 
a gravestone, out sprang a boy ; then another and 
another, till quite a troop of them went whooping 
by in some boyish panic. It was like a sudden 
resurrection of imps from the graves. 

The church was rather rude, but of true country 
character : a nave with chancel several feet higher 
giving a certain charm of the unexpected to it, as 
different pitches do. It was full of exquisitely 



THE EAST GOWER COAST 187 

arranged growing plants, small palms, and tropical 
flowers with white, purple, and pale red blooms — 
the whole kept with extreme care. Evidently a 
good spirit was in attendance. The church would 
have tempted the most restless wanderer in, to give 
himself up to human hopes and holy fears for a 
breathing space. 

This experience was so good that it tempted 
another halt at the next church — Pennard. A 
still simpler building, it had chosen a hermit's site 
under a fir-wood, in a curiously isolated place. I 
left Mercury at the gate, my coat and wallet and 
gloves strapp'd on the carrier. Inside I found a 
carved pulpit, and stayed to sketch a dragon thrice 
repeated on the upper panels, rudely but well 
designed — a sort of dragon trailant. The beast, I 
am sorry to say, proved actively malevolent. 
When I went out again Mercury was there, but 
wallet and gloves were clean gone. The roads, the 
landscape, the trees, gave no sign. It was clearly 
the dragon's doing. Much exercised at this black- 
magic, I went on my way smiling Malvolio-like 
smiles and gently objurgating. 

No village of Pennard appeared. No doubt the 
dragon had used his arts upon it too. I took 
lunch — home-made bread, Gower cheese, and good 
ale — at a small inn in Park Mill. Pennard Castle 
lies a mile away down a curious sand-valley. 
Having climbed up from the cwm and filled one's 
shoes with loose sand in doing so, one was inclined 
to make much of the extreme solitariness of the 
Castle and the desolation of the sunned courts with 
the sand silted deep on the floors. However, in 
emerging from the Castle, I saw the white stubs of 
a golf course. Near by, two small children were 
rolling down a sandhill and shrieking with impish 



188 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

delight, while, regardless of the noise and all outer 
things, a lady lay couched against a green knoll 
writing — no doubt a romance of the Castle — 
writing as if for dear life. 

This unexpected apparition had to serve in place 
of the ancient ghost of Pennard Castle, whom the 
golf players have no doubt driven away now for 
good. The " Gwrach y Rhibyn " it was who used 
to haunt the walls, and she even resented any 
impertinent visitor, especially after dark. One 
such there was who went there by night in her 
despite, and failed to reach home. Next day they 
found him bruised, scratched, and bleeding, his hair 
matted with sand and blood. He said the G'rach 
had pounced on him like an eagle, and pecked him 
with her beak, and scratched him with her long 
bird-like talons. One detail, that she smelt like a 
" bucket o' tar," sounds bad. Since then she has 
had the Castle of a night to herself. 

Pennard has a better and more authentic folk- 
tale than this, however. Once, on the night of 
the wedding feast of its Welsh chief and castellan, 
who had carried back a rich bride from the North 
after fighting there for her father, the watchman 
heard an unusual humming and soft shrilling 
within the walls. He grew uneasy as he listened, 
and then called the porter out from behind the 
great door. He, too, heard the uncanny sound. 
Together they went into the yard, and saw there 
in the moon-dazzle a troop of the Tylwyth Teg, or 
Fair Family, dancing and singing. Full of amaze, 
they ran back to tell the bridegroom of the sight. 
But he fell into a rage, and swore he would have no 
"coblynau" (goblins) in his castle, and finally rushed 
out into the moonlight and attacked the moon- 
beams as Cuchulain fought the waves — in default 



THE EAST GOWER COAST 189 

of the small folk, who had all disappeared. But 
they took their fairy revenge all the same. A voice 
like the wind rising cried, " y dyn heb groesaw. 
Bydd heb gastell, heb giniaw " — that is, " The 
man without welcome. He shall be without castle 
or wedding feast ! " Even as the voice died away 
the wind rose and blew the sand up in such clouds 
that it smothered the Castle, covered the wedding 
feast like snow, and drove the people out home- 
less. 

Pennard Castle, however, is one of the few 
castles that are traditionally of faery origin ; 
which in Wales generally means that the site was 
that of a British Caer before it came into the hands 
of the later castle-builders. The tradition, which 
seems contrary to the above story, is that it was, 
like Hay Castle, built in a single night ; some say 
by the Tylwyth Teg, some by a Welsh Fferyll 
(Virgil, i.e., a wizard), who did it to save his life. 
The Normans had taken him prisoner after a 
Welsh raid, and gave him the choice either of 
building up the Castle in a night or dying in the 
morning. In the morning it was built. It was 
apparently as a faery fort — a haunted " rath," to 
use the Irish word — that Pennard first got its 
uncanny name. 

For botanists, it is haunted by a rare creature, 
too — the shade of Draba aizoides. Some of the 
guide-books confidently say this rare plant grows 
on the walls. If ever it did, it does so no longer. 
It does grow in Gower, but it needs a cliff climber 
to get it. 

On the return journey from Pennard we were 
rapidly descending a lane north of Bishopston 
valley, when we overtook two young men with tin 
botany cases strapped on their shoulders. Within 



190 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

those tin tubes I saw, as plainly as if the covering 
had been of glass, the covetable small leaves of 
Draba aizoides. We pulled up abreast of the two 
wayfarers, and asked boldly and all short if they 
had been in quest of her. They smiled ingenuously 
in Scotch, and said Yes. The elder and taller of the 
two showed me fresh scratches and skin-wounds on 
his hands, and then opened his case. Most gener- 
ously he bestowed a sprig of the delicate Gower 
Draba on me. A later drawing of the leaves is 
too rough to be given here. 

Draba aizoides is the yellow Alpine whitlow-grass, 
and though it was now only mid-April the yellow 
flowers were just past their prime, and some had 
already faded to brown. The leaves (to quote the 
Rev. C. A. Johns) are "narrow, pointed, rigid, 
glossy, keeled and fringed." Its cousin, Draba 
verna, the vernal whitlow-grass, is more common, 
and flowers as early as the lesser celandine. They 
belong to the Cruciferae. Another " Draba," the 
Rock whitlow-grass, grows on the highest of the 
Highland mountain-rocks. I think one of the two 
botanists said he had gathered this, too, on Ben 
Nevis. They had only a week's holiday, and had 
come all the way from Edinburgh to look for such 
treasure-trove in Devonshire and South Wales ; 
and they spoke with infectious enthusiasm of their 
adventure. 

At Park Mill may be found — where precisely it 
would not be right to disclose — the Hairy Cress, 
Arabis hirsuta, another of the cruciform herbs. 
On the sands in the neighbourhood, too, may be 
seen the Sea Stork's Bill — Erodium maritimum — 
and other sand-loving plants. The Sea Stork's Bill 
has spiral seed-caps which untwist in the rain, and 
can jump like a frog. Ilordeum maritimum is some- 



THE EAST GOWER COAST 191 

thing seen too, but more and more rarely. The 
Osmunda regalis was to be seen a few summers ago, 
growing wild in the marshes of Western Gower. 
The Meadow Clary, one of the sages, is another un- 
common plant found in the peninsula, which is not 
usually thought a native of Wales. 




THE MALEVOLENT DRAGON : PENNARD CHURCH (p. 187). 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE GOWER CAVES — THE " RED LADY OF PAVILAND " 
— GOODWICK AND PENRICE — ARTHUR'S STONE — 
WORM'S HEAD — WEOBLEY CASTLE AND THE 
LASS OF PENCLAWDD 

Within reach on foot from Oystermouth, and 
stretching along the whole south coast of Gower, 
beginning at Bacon Hole — suggestive name — you 
hare two series of caves to explore, some of which 
represent the earliest kind of cliff-castle known 
in Britain. But for the sake of the adventure, 
you ought to follow the coast round Pwll Du, and 
see the camp above. 

If you have come from Caswell Bay, you have 
already passed Brandy Cove, and crossed the end 
of the Bishopston valley, up which the smugglers 
used to " run " their brandy- wine and other goods 
and now a famous objective, because of its extreme 
picturesqueness, for Gower picnickers and holi- 
day-makers. The way up the valley, from the 
Beaufort Arms, and this side of High Pennard, 
after crossing the stream, lies under Pwll Du 
Wood. So along the stream, when there is any 
stream ; and when it is lost to sight, along its 
dry overflow flood course, which serves as a 
rough road. I have already spoken of Bishopston 
Church, but might have added that its old Welsh 

192 



THE GOWER COAST 193 

name is Llandeilo-Verwalt, and that the Rev. 
Edward Davies, author of Celtic Researches 
and the Mystery of the Ancient Britons, was 
rector of the parish, and lies buried in the 
churchyard. As the Welsh name shows, the 
church is another of the series in South Wales 
dedicated to St. Teilo. 

The next point westward after the cove or cwm 
at the opening of the valley is High Pennard, whose 
name and that of its fellow Pennard further on 
may remind you of two other Pennards, East and 
West, across the Channel in the heart of Somerset 
and the Vale of Avalon. A very different sea-shore 
is this to that at the foot of the vale where the 
Somerset Pennards lie. Here you have Pwll Du 
Head, where you ought to explore the old camp 
on its west side, to end the blind peninsula ; and 
going west you reach the farm in the dip at 
Dipslade, close to which lies the great bone cave of 
Bacon Hole, to which a farm-track and foot- 
path lead. The cave, now that it has given up 
its bones, need hardly tempt the antiquarian to 
descend the cliff to its mouth. The cave is pitched 
in a natural " fault," causing a fissure in the lime- 
stone. The first question that arises about the 
bones is how and why they were brought there ? 
Were some of them the remains of the feasts of 
the carnivorous, and possibly cannibal, prehistoric 
cave-men who lived on these shores, long before 
the first Celt left his home in the east? 
Cannibal, it ought only to be said under protest. 
Some later discoveries, as in the Croatian Bone 
Cave, near Agram, whose situation on the sand- 
stone cliff sixty feet above the Krapina River is very 
like this, hint at a more terrible kind of ogre in 
the old days, with powerful jaws, who ate some- 

13 



194 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

times rhinoceros steaks, sometimes his fellow-beings. 
There are hearths in the Krapina Cave to show 
on how gruesome and vast a scale his cookery was. 
Who can tell us what scenes went on in Bacon and 
Minchin Holes? Only aborigines like the "Red 
Lady of Paviland." 

In the time of the Press-Gangs the more secure 
of these caves were used by the men of the 
neighbourhood as hiding-places, the women-folk 
bringing provisions when they could. Between 
High Pennard and Pennard Burrows, just below 
the Castle visited yesterday, lie three more caves, 
of which Minchin Hole and Fox Hole are worth 
a visit. Minchin Hole is a palatial hole, compara- 
tively : high and wide, nearly opposite the rocks 
of Sir Christopher's Knowl; and Bosco's Den and 
Bowen's Parlour, or the Devil's Hole, have smug- 
glers' tales to tell, as well as their prehistoric dead 
to give up. A comparatively recent romancer has 
refurnished these Parlours, and called their hero 
back to life under the name of Rounce the 
Smuggler. * 

Another four miles' tramping past Penmaen, along 
the Gower backbone, Cefn y Bryn, and one reaches, 
on the northern side of the " cefn," first a Holy 
Well, of which Morgan le Fay might have been the 
guardian, and then the big cromlech — Arthur's 
Stone, where the Gower pilgrimage often ends. 

It is easy to miss it on that stone-strewn reach of 
high moorland, on which you can trace, as at Stone- 
henge, the alignment of a great open-air temple 
whose sun-determined lines and spaces are witness 
of its architecture. Indeed, as you stand there and 
look around you, you begin to realise that the 
place was one where the earth's relation to the 

* See The Man at Odds : A Romance of the Severn Sea. 



THE GOWER COAST 195 

stars and to the elements was destined to appeal 
at once, as at Carnac and Salisbury Plain, to those 
astronomical builders and starry masons. 

As for the cromlech or dolmen, St. David, tradi- 
tion says, split this stone with a sword to 
show " it was not sacred, as the Druids held." 
Llanddewi — the Llan or church-close of David — 
about two miles south-west, gives just a tinge of 
local reality to this tale. Camden, more matter-of- 
fact, says that pieces were broken off to make 
into millstones ; and this may serve to remind one 
that the stone is really of pudding-stone, or red 
sandstone conglomerate. Others will say, perhaps, 
that since this is a burial-place, it might be another 
of the High King's seven fabled sleeping-places ; 
that here Morgan le Fay, or the Queen of Gore, 
brought him by art-magic after the "last dread 
battle " ; and that here he lies, waiting for his 
waking day. Before it was known as Arthur's 
Stone, however, the cromlech was called, after St. 
Ketti, " Maen Ceti," which is recalled by the 
proverb, " mal llwyth maen Ceti " — like the load of 
Ketty's Stone, spoken of any particularly heavy 
burden. 

One last uncanny peculiarity of the huge cap- 
stone must be told. Once a year, on Christmas 
Eve, it leaves its place in the dolmen and goes 
down to the sea to drink, and woe to the wight 
that sees it at that office. 

The view from Cefn Bryn, near and above the 
stone, is entrancing and one to further every idea 
of the ancient sacredness of the place. It only 
remains to go on to Worm's Head, and there sit an 
hour, if it is not too windy a day, perched on its 
extraordinary sea-perch looking westward, to 
understand why the land of Gower required a 



196 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

water-witch for queen, and why it became an 
enchanted province in Arthuria. 

One February day — it must be twenty years ago 
— I and a friend, a Welsh namesake of the poet 
Dryden, went to Worm's Head when a furious 
westerly gale was blowing. We had fairly to creep 
on hands and knees along the neck leading to it, 
such was the force of the wind, and we expected 
to find the Head itself quite untenable. To our 
surprise, the air proved instead to be comparatively 
still on the furthest and highest brink. There we 
sat in great peace and comfort while the wind 
raged below us and vexed the waves and buffeted 
the sea-birds, including one black-backed gull 
who seemed intent on getting into the bottom 
ledges. 

From Worm's Head it is roughly a league back 
along the coast to Yellow Top and the Paviland 
Caves, where Dr. Buckland came upon the pre- 
historic " Red Lady of Paviland " — red because of 
the red-iron stain on her poor bones. We might, 
adopting the old manner of the Triads, say that the 
three famous ladies of the land of Gore were Maud 
de Haia, Morgan le Fay, and the "Red Lady of 
Paviland." 

Three old British (?) camps are to be easily 
traced out on the cliffs between Worm's Head 
and Port Eynon. At Port Eynon, once a notorious 
smugglers' centre, now a sandy watering-place 
where a folk-lore collector has lately found some 
good material, you are close to Oxwich Castle and 
Oxwich Bay. You might have crossed from Pennard 
Castle here on your way west, for at low tide you 
can get round to Oxwich Castle from the Park 
Mill outlet by the sands, saving a long circuit. 

Oxwich has a desperate old feud of the Mansels 



THE GOWER COAST 197 

and Herberts wrapped up in its chronicle. The 
dispute rose over a French vessel wrecked on the 
coast on St. Stephen's Day, December 26, 1557, 
which was laden with wool, figs, and raisins. 
The Mansel wreckers had evidently been prompt in 
rifling the ship, and had carried off much of the 
booty to houses in " Oxwick." Getting wind of it, 
Sir George Herbert of Swansea, who claimed the 
wreck as his, arrived hotfoot at the village with 
his retainers. They went to several houses and 
dragged out the booty that had been stored there 
and carried it to the church. Then they went in 
force to the Castle, and at the gate were met by 
Sir Rice's son, Edward, who had been away, possibly 
to get help. A fight followed, in which Edward 
was hurt in the arm. With the defending party 
was an old lady, a woman of great spirit, Mistress 
Anne Mansel of Landewy, Edward's aunt, who had 
returned with him to the Castle on horseback. She 
appears in white ruff and brown redingote, as the 
Welsh gentlewoman of that day. She had already 
encountered Sir George on the highway, and bade 
him not go " to the said mansion house against the 
said Edward, or contend with him for such pylfery 
goods ! " 

" It is not for that," Sir George replied. " Your 
nephew has abused my servants, as good gentle- 
men as Edward himself, whom I will teach to know 
the worst servant in my house." 

Thereupon they rode on to the gate, where they 
were met in force. Old Mistress Mansel there 
dismounted, and went on into the gateway. Her 
horse, after a first brush between the two parties, 
was put athwart the gate, as a temporary barrier, 
while she herself stood two or three yards behind 
the supporters of young Mansel. He, says one 



198 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

witness, " stapped one stepe f urth of the gate, 
when he saw the others advance, and struck at 
William Herbert." " One of Edward Hansel's 
men had a gleyve staff, and the others swerdes." 
Mistress Mansel seemed to try to persuade her 
nephew to be placable, and " wold have pushed 
him in at the gate." 

" I pray you, good Cosin, get you in ! " she 
said. 

But his blood was up and his sword out, and the 
old lady of Llandewy had to stand aside. She had 
paused behind him, only two or three yards away, 
when one of the siegers, Watkin John ap Watkin, 
transferring his sword to his left hand, picked up 
a big stone in his right, and threw it. Evidently 
intended for those his sword could not reach, it 
struck the old gentlewoman full on the forehead, 
and she fell to the ground. 

" Upon the strykinge downe of the said Anne 
Manxell, they within the gate cryed owte ' Murd- 
der, murdder.' Upon whyche throwe and crye, the 
said S r- G. H. called his men away." 

Another witness deposed that Sir George 
Herbert " before the fraye, brag'd that he wold 
bynd the said Ed. Maunsel like a boye and send 
him to his father like a cocke." 

Star Chamber proceedings followed, and Sir 
George Herbert had to pay heavy fines and damages 
both to the Crown and to the Mansels. The deed 
of inquest held on the body of the old lady says 
the mortal wound was of the breadth of two 
thumbs and the depth — "even to the brain," 
though the stone was of " no great bigness." 

Oxwich Castle was occupied by Mansels till 
1658. Then it was let to Mr. Francis Be van, whose 
descendants still farm the land. The Mansels get 



THE GOWER COAST 199 

their name from Mans, as you discover in the 
" Roman de Rou " : — 

"E par consence des Mansels 
Helies e Mans s'embati 

E cil del Mans l'uut recoilli." 

The most famous of the family was Sir John 
Mansel, Lord Chancellor, Lord Chief Justice of 
England, Keeper of the Great Seal, Prior of 
Beverley, Treasurer of York, and the friend (" in 
this world and in the world to come") of 
Henry III. 

The sea has won a long tide's reach on the land 
almost within living memory. A print to be seen 
at Swansea Library shows one evidence of it in 
the vanished old parsonage house, Oxwich, washed 
away by the sea, about 1805. It stood between 
the church and the tide-line, which has now crept 
up to the churchyard. 

Penrice Castle only lies a mile nor'-west of 
Oxwich ; and after Ostremuere it was the " maist 
strongest " hold in Gower. Penrice is Pen Rhys, 
and hither drew to a hold Rhys, the unlucky grand- 
son of Iestyn ab Gwrgant. He was soon over- 
taken by the Norman flood, with Henry de 
Beaumont in the van ; and Rhys was beheaded. 
The present Castle was built and added to at 
various times, and became one of the wonders of 
Gower. The place now impresses one as overlaid 
with immemorial layers of antiquity. Another 
newer house has grown up under the shelter of 
the old, just as new trees have sprung from the 
old, still standing side by side in the old park and 
by its sleepy wild-duck pond. With one fellow- 
traveller I passed it one gusty winter afternoon 



200 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

in 1889 ; with another, M. A. R., in broad, rich 
summer, twenty years later. In both seasons, it 
breathed the rich, double-distilled antique aroma 
of the house upon house, the patrimony upon 
patrimony, that have warmed generations of com- 
fortable heirs and well-endowed dames. On the 
last occasion we were not surprised, I remember, 
to find at the King Arthur Inn at Reynoldston 
a welcome waiting us, with tea above a walled 
garden and rose-petals falling into our teacups. 

West of Cefn Bryn, the cairns on Rhosilly 
Downs and Llanmadoc Hill are the best vantage- 
grounds from which to survey the coast-line. 
There are three standing stones in a field, a mile 
west of Reynoldston, which you can visit on the 
way to Llangennydd and Llanmadoc. And south 
of Reynoldston lies " Stout Hall," whose owner, 
Colonel Wood, unearthed one of the great bone- 
caves. 

The history of Llangennydd and Llanmadoc 
parishes have been written with affectionate full- 
ness by a quondam rector, the Rev. J. D. Davies. 
His death alone prevented his completing his work 
as local chronicler in detail of all Gower. He tells 
in its pages the strange story of the wreck, without 
any gale or storm to engender it, in January, 1868, 
of sixteen vessels in Broughton Bay. Eighteen or 
nineteen sail were outward bound, vessels from 
80-400 tons burden. There was a tricky ground- 
sea, not noticed particularly till they reached 
Whitford Lighthouse. Here one or two anchored ; 
the others having been let go by the pilot-tug 
hoped to clear Burry Holms with the help of the 
ebb tides, and make a good ofiing. Only one or 
two did so. The noodtide set in; the wind died 
away ; and some sixteen of them drifted back, 



THE GOWER COAST 201 

some dashing against the rocks, some against each 
other. A few sank in mid-river, having their 
bottoms knocked out by thumping on the sand; 
for the swell was so heavy that at one moment a 
boat would be atop a wave, and then be swept 
down, thud, on the bottom. A pilot ship, the 
Hulk, was in the Bay, and a few men escaped to 
her by boat ; and stayed there till day. Next 
morning there was great grief. The disaster 
happened between nine and ten at night, and no 
one in the village knew of it, but at daylight 
the shore was seen to be covered from Whitford 
Sker to Burry Holms with seamen's clothes, 
broken spars, hulls of vessels, ropes, and large 
strewage of coal.' The drowned sailors were 
buried, as they came ashore, in various church- 
yards of this coast. 

On that ill-starred night the choir was at 
practice in Llanmadoc Church when suddenly an 
indescribable cry of terror was heard in the church- 
yard, as of some one in mortal fear. " I ran out," 
said Mr. Da vies, the rector, " to see what it was, 
and saw a young lad standing there, his face dis- 
torted with fright. He said he had seen a man 
without his hat come and look in through the 
window. The boy, being taken into the church, 
was some time in coming to himself. It was be- 
lieved that what he saw was the ghost of one of 
the drowned men, as this was the very hour of the 
wrecks." 

Working back along the North-Gower coast, you 
have leagues of sandy wastes on your left hand as 
you approach Weobley Castle. The guide-books 
will tell you what a dull, melancholy region it is. 
For myself, I can only say that on a hazy spring 
day the effect of the yellow sand merging in the 



202 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

pale milky white water of the Burry Inlet had a 
charm of its own. The long sand-spit of White- 
ford Barrows looked neither like earth nor sea in 
the shimmering April grisaille ; it suggested an 
isle of apparitions, an unconditioned peninsula, 
where " the waters wap " and the waves are wan. 

Weobley Castle has a dead kernel within its 
shell : a farm-house which seems to have crept 
into it for shelter, and there died for want of 
light, overwhelmed by the Castle spirit. The 
farmer was the last of a great line of lords and 
castellans. Harry Beaumont, says the " Brut," 
was the first Norman to seize on the place. He 
built a rude castle of sorts here, having thrown 
out the sons of Caradoc ap Iestyn, at the time of 
his building of Swansea, Llychwr, and Penrhys 
(where Rhys of Caradoc lost his head). But fifty 
years later, in 1150, another Rhys came and his 
brother Meredydd with him, and took the Castle 
and burnt it. And in 1215, yet another, Rhys 
Ieuanc, young Rhys, after taking Kidwelly and 
Carnwillian, took all the Gower castles one after 
another. Leland speaks of the de la Meres at 
Weobley, but he is confusing them with the house 
of Sir John de la Bere. 

Llanrhidian, finely posted on the rise above the 
marsh, impresses you as you enter it from below 
with an air of untold antiquity, supported by the 
two Druidic-looking stones, one of them a Maen 
Hir, near the approach to the church. 

I asked a farm lad, who was leading a frisky 
yearling to water, what the stones were for. 

" Well, I've heard tell the Romans used to whip 
their slaves at one of them," he said, "and you 
could see where the stapple was." 

Clearly enough, the stones had been coupled as 



THE GOWER COAST 203 

they now stand within recent times ; but there is 
always a fragment of real history behind these 
village fables ; and Llanrhidian is steeped in the 
quadruple dye, British, Roman, Welsh, and 
Norman, of popular tradition. 

In the churchyard also lie two separate stones, 
which since the church was once dedicated to St. 
Illtyd serve to urge the old question about the 
number of Illtyd churches that pass under other 
names. On the high ground above is an old 
camp, " Cil Ivor," where Ivor ab Cadivor en- 
trenched himself in the year 1110. 

At high tides the road across Llanrhidian marsh 
to Llanmorlais is covered. It looked to me, when 
I crossed it, as if it were never thoroughly dry. 
Old cockleshell mounds and tidal posts afford the 
only break in the long salt-flats. The sheep that 
feed there seem unusually motionless from sym- 
pathy with the scene. Except for an occasional 
bleat, a railway whistle across at Llwchwr, or 
the whistle of snipe, the silence is melancholily 
complete. 

A famous City of Cockles lies two miles north 
of Llanrhidian-Penclawdd. One day, how long 
ago it need not be told, I reached its rambling 
street, that looked as if it would wander off into 
the sea- waste, with Davy for guide ; and we learnt 
from an old standard smoking by the low sea- 
wall that the "works" were idle and the place 
was out of luck. 

"There would be no living," he said, "at Pen- 
clawdd save for the Cocos ! " He pointed to a 
cottage. " That house there ; eight, i'e wir, it has 
eight in it, and John he hasn't done a stroke these 
months ! " 

A little later, and we saw the straggling troop 



204 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

of cockle-women, seven or eight of them, the tired 
wage-earners, returning bare-legged with their 
cockles over the sandy causeway. The eldest of 
them was a woman of about sixty, with an 
anxious, much-weathered, whimsical brown visage 
under her cap. The youngest was one of the 
comeliest, merriest-faced young girls ever seen. 
Her bare wet feet, flecked with seaweed, gleamed 
in the sun like soft ivory as she halted there. 
She dropped her load for a moment on the sandy 
wall, with a curious gesture as of part relief from 
the weight, part pride in the " take " of cockles. 

That afternoon was spent in exploring the North 
Gower stretches and hunting with Davy for " old 
sto-ans ! " But in the evening we returned to 
take train at Llanmorlais. The next station was 
Penclawdd, and looking out of the window, he 
directed me to a small group on the platform. It 
was the younger part of the very troop of cockle- 
pickers we had seen in the morning by the strand. 
They were mightily changed now, tricked out in 
their best, and one or two in high colours ; and 
the contrast they made with the brown bags of 
cockles, over which they mounted guard on a 
porter's truck, was queer enough. But one of 
them, whose back was turned to us, wore a plain 
grey gown and dark jacket. It was not until the 
cockle-packs in bags were being hoisted into the 
van that we saw her face. The other girls care- 
lessly stood by, and let the porters do the work. 
But she, seeing that time pressed, seized her own 
bag with a look of indescribable pride in the 
grotesque oozy thing, as much as to say, "You 
are mine and of my getting, and you are worth 
silver, Cocos fach ! " 

As the train moved out she stood gazing after 



THE GOWER COAST 



205 



it like a lover after her beloved, and her smile, 
lighting up her eyes in the station gloom, seemed 
to make her face luminous against the shadows. 
Then we realised we had had in this vanishing 
apparition of the lass of Penclawdd a glimpse of 
one of those faces that, once seen, whether against 
a railway hoarding or a salt-marsh, are because of 
their gleaming lines — conductors of some inner 
radiance — stamped on the eye of a mortal man 
for ever. 




•j«?5 



OLD OYSTER-SHELL LAMP, GOWEK COAST. 



CHAPTER XIX 

BURRY INLET AND CARMARTHEN BAY — CASTELL 
LLYCHWR — CWRT-Y-CARNAU — THE GREAT 
BOAR HUNT IN AMMAN VALE 

Amongst the minor lazy sensations of the Welsh 
coast that help a man to realise without effort 
the enormous pushing and dilating force of its 
spring-tides, must be counted that of standing on 
Loughor or Llychwr Bridge, and watching the 
salt water pour in from the Burry Inlet. It comes 
in there at a swimming pace, deep ochre or light 
brown in colour, covered with patches of seething 
froth ; and the timbers and piers are so built as 
to give the eye due pleasure in matching the 
resistant baulks and timber structure against the 
brimming element. 

The river Llychwr, that swallows the salt tide 
there, is not a long one, and its tidal reach is brief, 
but it is a stream worth exploring to its source, 
where it flows clean out of the rock at Llygad 
Llychwr, the " Eye of Loughor." 

Some of the intervening reaches are spoilt now 
by the wilful ugliness of the industrial communi- 
ties — mean streets, buildings without decency, and 
poverty, or the next thing to it, made prim in a 
kind of dreadful workhouse uniform of fire-brick 
facings and mortar. But leave these, the common 

206 



BURRY INLET AND CARMARTHEN BAY 207 

affliction of many of the fairest Welsh valleys, 
and you escape again into the verdure and pas- 
toral extents that make the upper Llwchwr lands 
pleasant in the gaze of Heaven. 

The village or town of Llychwr, for the place 
had borough rights and a portreeve and burgesses 
with coats to their backs, has a curious name in 
Welsh tradition — Tre Avanc — Beaver's Town. 
Hence, say the up-town gossips, the place used to 
be called by way of derision " Trewanc." It 
figures in the Roman map as " Leucrum or 
Leucarum," the last big halt in the road before 
Maridunum, or Carmarthen. The Castle is another 
of those reared on a three or four-times occupied 
site. The Britons used the castle-tump originally ; 
when the Normans came, Henry Beaumont, the 
first great Gower advener, is said to have built 
the first Norman castle. In or about 1115 the 
two sons of Griffith ab Rhys attacked, stormed, 
and destroyed the Castle above the old Beaver 
town, Tre Avanc or Trewanc. 

In the north country the Conwy was the chief 
river-haunt of the " Avanc " ; but the Llychwr 
river-beast was possibly less fabulous. The sea 
has won great vantage on the land here, and if 
we look for the original Beaver town it must be 
below bridge. 

Another monster, the Twrch Trwyth, is to be 
tracked here. He has left his spoor in the upper 
Llychwr and the Amman valley. Sir John Rhys, 
in his Celtic Folklore, traces this Questing 
Beast at Clyn Ystyn, a farm between Carmarthen 
and the waters-meet of the Amman and Llychwr, 
and thence across into the Llychwr valley. 
Remembering the Gower bone-caves, one cannot 
help speculating about these two creatures, and 



208 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

wondering if the Twrch Trwyth and the " Avanc " 
are not in Celtic folk-lore a race-memory of the 
huge brutes that perished centuries before any 
Celtic word was spoken in Britain ? As time 
went, the tradition may have been tacked on to 
better-known animals ; and the wild boar and 
the beaver served as the nearest types of their 
mammoth forefathers. Those who have known 
a small child make a tiger out of a gib-cat will be 
at no loss to understand the process. 

One need not insist on these remote events. 
But there are places in South Wales — sea-caves, 
waste places in the sands, and uncleared forest 
brakes — that inevitably bring the primitive fauna 
to mind, and the vale of Llychwr and the sand- 
dunes below are of them. One unpropitious 
wintry afternoon I alighted at Llychwr in a rain- 
storm that immediately drove me into cover at 
an old inn. The landlord, who was polishing his 
brass taps, was unluckily a new-comer to the 
place and knew little about it. However, he called 
in a serving-maid, a native of that country-side, 
who showed the painful desire to be exact which 
one so often finds, in contradiction of the English 
idea of the Welsh peasant, among the simpler 
country-folk who are not tourist- corrupted. Mari 
Jones stood in the doorway, two or three steps 
above the level of the common-room of the ale- 
house ; and the fire-shine in the kitchen behind 
tinged her brown hair and cordially framed her 
in a glimmering ruddy umber light. The figure 
made an inviting contrast to the cheerless and 
fireless chamber where I stood doubtfully in my 
damp clothes. She had been as far as Llygad 
Llychwr and firmly believed the river flowed 
thither underground from the smaller Llyn-y-Van. 



BURRY INLET AND CARMARTHEN BAY 209 

Yes, she knew Cwrt-y-Caruau too : it was beyond 
Black Hill and the common — close to the water ; 
there used to be a church there and a place for 
the monks. "Tir Brenin " was hard by. She had 
nothing to tell me of the "Sanctuary" at Loughor: 
but folk said there was a passage underground 
from Castell Llychwr to the old church at Cwrt-y- 
Carnau. Some strange tale seems to be attached 
to this house, but when I asked her about it 
she slightly shook her head (having at the critical 
moment heard a noise within the kitchen) and so 
disappeared through the door. 

A night or two later, at a very different inn- 
keeper's hearth, not far from Ostremuere Castle, 
I asked him if he knew Llychwr? "Yes, yes!" 
said he, " but you should go and see Cwrt-y-Carnau ! 
That's an old place there — a great place with 
great histories ! " He offered to escort me there, 
but fate was against it, and Cwrt-y-Carnau keeps 
its secret for me. 

The same gossip told me a tale about the 
" knockers " and the mysterious Red Dog in the 
under-sea workings of the Morva Colliery, near 
Port Talbot. Some of the colliers saw the Red 
Dog and heard the knockers one night and took 
it for a warning. They would have refused to 
descend the pit next morning, but that others 
who had heard the same noises and stayed at 
home, had been fined for it some weeks before. So, 
after a midnight discussion, they voted for going 
to work; but the Red Dog was justified, for many 
died in the terrible explosion next day. 

To return for a moment to the Llychwr and its 
abrupt source. It is not for a coast-book to delay 
over such tempting inland places as Cwrt Bryn-y- 
Beirdd, now a farm-house, and Capel Dewi, and 

14 



210 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

the Druid graves — Beddau Derwyddon. With 
three delightful companions, two of them children 
prepared for wonders, I last went in dry summer 
weather to the ' Eye of Llychwr, and even then 
the water flowing out of the rock, although not 
enough to float a boat, as commonly said of it, 
would have floated a coracle. The Eye had lost 
some of its old miraculous effect, by being new- 
enclosed in a smooth dam of Portland cement ; 
but the scene on that wildish moorland, often as 
I have visited it, always looks mysterious — a spot 
to keep old, and beget new, legends. The Castle 
at Carreg Cennen, the sternest, loneliest, rockiest 
fastness in all that country, rears up its abutments 
and sheer towers like an Oriental stronghold or 
castle bewitched on its grey and red rock, not 
two miles away ; the Black Mountains, filling up 
the northern confines, keep a gloom which even 
in sunlight is never lifted. At the foot of the 
Castle Rock runs another stream, the Cennen, 
which seems plainly destined to join the Llychwr ; 
but it goes off on an errand of its own, past 
Pont Trapp and Derwydd, to join the Towy 
instead. Four miles south the Amman joins the 
Llychwr stream, and "by here," as David says, 
came the Twrch Trwyth and his little pigs on 
the famousest boar hunt in all the sagas. You 
can take up the scent there at its hottest in the 
Mabinogion : — 

" And the huntsmen went to hunt the Twrch 
Trwyth as far as Dyffryn Lychwr. And two of 
the pigs, Gold-haired Heather-Hog and the Grizzly 
Quester, turned on the hunters and killed all but 
one. Then Arthur and his host came to the place 
where Heather-Hog and Grizzly were, and he let 
loose all his hounds on them ; and what with the 



BURRY INLET AND CARMARTHEN BAY 211 

hubbub and the shouting and barking, Twrch 
Trwyth heard them, and came to the succour of 
his hard-pressed pigs. Until that time, the Twrch 
Trwyth had never showed himself to them, not 
since he crossed the Irish Sea. But now, with the 
men and the hounds set upon him, he started off 
and made for Amman Hill (Mynydd Amanw). And 
there a young boar of his was killed. It was life 
for life then, and first one young boar was killed, 
then another : until in full flight the Questing Beast 
went on to Amman Valley, where he lost two 
more of his train. Of all his pigs, there went with 
him alive from that place none save Golden-bristled 
Heather Hog and Grizzly Quester." 

The hunt goes on fast and mortal then, and 
Grizzly Quester, after killing many at Ystrad Yw» 
including Arthur's uncles, Red Eyed Emys and 
Gwr-Bothu, is himself hard pressed. The Twrch 
Trwyth himself has at length to yield up the 
fabulous jewelled Razor and Scissors in the Severn 
Flood and the Golden Comb in Cornwall, whence 
he is driven into the deep sea. And thenceforth 
it was never known where he went. This great 
hunting saga — of the Boar, the Razor, Comb, and 
Scissors — that might have been told by a mediaeval 
barber-surgeon of genius in his cups, who had 
drunk deep of the black wine of Kilhwch, takes 
a new tinge of local colour when you relate the 
Great Boar to the twin valleys of Llychwr and 
Amman. 

On a placid airless summer day you might think 
the flat, sandy shore between the mouth of the 
Llychwr and the Nose of Pembrey, with the wave- 
less ripple of the ebb tide lapping it, one of the 
most innocent coasts to be had by any water. 
But when sailing-ships were plentiful the bay 



212 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

and estuary often made havoc of those that went 
astray in the Burry Inlet. The corner at " Cefn 
Sidan," the Silken Ridge, was the most deadly 
spot. In 1828 it sent some notable French victims 
to their deaths. That November a West Indiaman 
that had come safe all the way from Martinique 
was wrecked on Cefn Sidan, and most of the crew 
and passengers perished. Among the latter were 
Colonel Coquelin and his daughter Adeline, niece 
of Josephine, former Empress of France. Father 
and daughter were buried at Pembrey in one 
grave ; and fourteen maidens in deep mourning, 
as Pembrey folk still tell you, attended the funeral 
as pall-bearers to the drowned girl. In the church- 
yard the stone may be seen which Welsh pity 
raised in memory of the French colonel and his 
child. 

The Castle at Llychwr suffered by being near 
the uplands, and it was often attacked and thrice 
surprised. Harry Beaumont's first ruder struc- 
ture was taken by Meredith and Rhys, of whom 
you heard at Weobley. It was rebuilt then, as 
custom was, on a more habitable scale ; but only 
to be again besieged, taken, and burnt to the 
ground. 

Curiously enough, when fifty years later Gerald 
de Barri passed this way with Archbishop Baldwin, 
he made no note of any castle, though he speaks 
of crossing the river. It was, no doubt, in ruins 
then. The present structure is part early thirteenth 
and part fourteenth century, according to W. G. 
Clark, the greatest castle-hunter who invaded this 
district. Before we left the earlier sieges we might 
have quoted the " Brut of the Princes," which 
tells how Rhys Ieaunc, or Young Rhys, collected 
in 1215 an army of huge size — " lu dirvawry veint" 



BURRY INLET AND CARMARTHEN BAY 213 

— and brought the Castle low. "And from thence 
he drew toward Gower, and first reduced Castell 
Llychwr." This suggests that it was the northern 
outpost of the Gower circuit — the key to the 
door. 



CHAPTER XX 

LLANELLY— ST. ELLI — THE OLD TOWN — THE 
SANDS OF PEMBREY — KIDWELLY AND ITS 
CASTLE 

Llanelly, black-a-vised, smoky, and unlovely, one 
of those towns that at first appear only destined 
to make wealth for the rich and poverty for the 
poor, does not attract the flying tourist. However, 
the town, despite its grime and its grime-producers, 
has its associations. Unexpectedly, it is one of 
the few places in Wales that can claim to have 
entertained George Meredith. The house where 
he stayed was afterwards occupied by the Welsh 
lyric poet "Elved"; and there, one winter night, 
during a visit some years ago, the present 
chronicler made acquaintance with another Car- 
marthen poet, the late Watcyn Wyn, an Eistedd- 
fodwr without guile and an incorrigible wit. At 
the Cardiff Eisteddfod of 1896, when the sun was 
pouring down like a furnace, Watcyn was en- 
countered as he emerged from the crowded 
Pavilion. 

" Sut mae, Watcyn? 'Tis very hot — mae hi yn 
boeth iawn ! Is the muse melting ? " 

" Melting ? Dyn anw'l ! There's enough of 
Watcyn lost to make a third-rate bard." 

Many of Watcyn's songs and ballads deal with 

214 



LLANELLY 215 

the country round his own centre of Ammanford. 
His prose was as idiomatic as his verse. 

Castle-hunters differ about the lost Castle of 
Llanelly. Probably it was only a British fort on 
the mound known as Pen Castell, now eaten up 
by the town. G. and I made an attempt to place 
the site, acting on the directions given us by a 
native. He bade us look in the empty markets, 
it not being market-day. We discovered, or 
thought we did, in which vacant alley of the 
market the gateway stood. But an uneasy idea 
afterwards occurred to us that the Honourable 
Cymmrodor who had pictured it for us had done 
so in a pleasant spirit of "Hud a Lledrith."* 
However, if the Castle is lost, there is still the 
old Stepney mansion, " Great House " (now called 
Llanelly House), to fall back upon. It was in a 
bad way when at the end of the eighteenth 
century it was taken in hand and saved to the 
town ; and its restorer, William Chambers of 
Bicknor, also built, I believe, the market-house. 
The original church at Llanelly was St. Elli's 
(hence the name of the town). The present build- 
ing was, because of its additional mid bell-tower, 
which has been spirited away by vandals, of un- 
usual design. Mr. Arthur Mee has written its 
history (it is dedicated to St. Paul, not St. Elli) 
with that affection which gives warmth to the 
parish record. There is another book on the old 
town by a native, Mr. Innes, which is crammed 
with the little disappearing local details and the 
local colour needed to individualise a place. He 
has, among the records, an account of Llanelly 
Bridge ; and, as we know, bridges and rivers and 
abers become things of moment to the Welsh 

* Illusion and Art Magic. 



216 TPIE SOUTH WALES COAST 

wayfarer. Over it the town-seer makes you see, 
as in an allegory of life, the pageant of old 
Llanelly — the coach with dusty horses, presently 
to be unharnessed and sent to swim in the bridge- 
pools ; the soldiers marching against "Rebecca"; 
and the funeral bier of Sir John Stepney, the coffin 
covered with a scarlet pall. 

South of the town, beyond the docks, on a sandy 
peninsula, lies a solitary farm-house with a long 
memory. Its name, Mach Ynys, is doubtfully 
said to be corrupted from Mynach Ynys, or 
Mynachdy-yn-Ynys(?). Here some have figured 
an early monastery on the strand, that was 
founded by St. Peiro, who was followed by that 
same Sampson whose pillar we saw at Llantwit. 

Over St. Elli, too, there is an old dispute — to wit, 
whether the mysterious child of a barren Queen 
in the unknown Isles of Grimbul, that Cadoc 
brought from oversea, was boy or girl ? However, 
Elli appears to have decided, when the day came, 
to be a boy. His sanctity, after his death, grew 
greater and greater. The Holy Wells of St. Elli 
— " Ffynnonau Elli " — were better known than any 
at Llandrindod, Builth, and otherwhere ; and one 
man told Fenton he had seen " seven parishes 
meet at the Mab Sant," or wake of St. Elli, on 
January 17th. 

Long afterwards the greater tradition of the 
Welsh pulpit was well carried on here by the 
eloquence of David Rees of " Capel Als." People tra- 
velled from a long way at times, as I have gathered 
from the Tales of a Grandfather (who lived at 
Carmarthen), to hear David Rees. One of the 
most remarkable traces of the old church-plays 
on record anywhere is to be found in the accounts 
of his early preaching. David used to carry with 



LLANELLY 217 

him into the pulpit little biblical puppets — that is, 
wooden figures dressed to represent some of the 
Old Testament characters — and he made them go 
through a brief interlude during his sermon. By 
lending them dramatic life, and vividly impersona- 
ting and differentiating them in his play of voice 
and gesture, he so enlivened his Mystery that the 
illusion he created and threw over his congregation 
was absolute. But after a time it came to be 
thought indecorous to use such aids to doctrine, 
and it was given up. The old habit of the Welsh 
pulpit, however, could not be killed out in a year 
of respectable Sundays. Only now is it giving 
way in other characteristics under the Anglicising, 
depolarising effect of the colleges and newspapers. 
But now, to travel on to Kidwelly, via Pembrey 
and Burry Port. The railway after leaving 
Llanelly skirts the sandy estuary of Cefn Patrick 
in a half amphibious engaging fashion. At spring- 
tides the sea laps against the railway embankment, 
until you seem to be running through deep water. 
Whether Patrick once sailed in a curragh or 
coracle over these sandy shallows, I do not know ; 
but the Saints had a mariner's trust in the water. 
It was their via media between the Celtic shores, 
Irish, Cornish, Breton, and Welsh. 

One veteran apostle I do remember by the Burry 
water-side, a London physician, the late Dr. 
George Bird, friend of Leigh Hunt, Swinburne, 
and Sir Richard Burton, the traveller, rechristened 
by one of his friends " the Apostle of Health." It 
was on a summer's evening, and riding sharp 
round a sandy spur on a bicycle, I came full tilt 
upon a little group of people, " beautiful women 
and radiant men," and this noble old man sitting 
in their midst. If St. Patrick ever sat by that 



218 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

water with an equal lustre and personal radiance, 
it is no wonder if legends multiplied about kirn. 

The constantly growing and multiplying sands 
of this estuary make a Sahara of the coast-line 
between Pembrey and Llanelly. It continues 
about six miles beyond the " Nose," over Pembrey 
Burrows and Towyn Burrows to Towyn Point. 
Beyond the end of it, at low tide, lie Cefn Sidan 
sands, two or three miles more. Hero they say 
once stood a fair city. Traces of foundations of 
walls and stubborn roots of trees are still to be 
seen, at unwonted low tides, especially after a 
heavy freshet in the Towy. How far the lost city 
may be traced to notions of the washed-away 
village of Hawton, which is shown in Saxton's and 
Speed's maps of the county, it would be hard to 
tell. Hawton lay, however, on the other side of 
the Gwendraeth, under St. Ishmael's. 

Coasting vessels long had a very warrantable 
dread of the treacherous sand-bay into which flow 
the Gwendraeth, Towy, and Taf Rivers. It is hard 
to get even a small yacht through the sands up to 
Kidwelly ; for you have a snaky track to negotiate 
that is only seen for what it really is at low water. 
The navigable way is bare half a cable in width, 
and on either side, at flood, there is about three 
feet of water over the sand. " Nothing bigger 
than a coal barge," says the Complete Sailor, 
" should try to make Kidwelly ! " 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE TOWY AND FERRYSIDE — LLANSTEPHAN CASTLE 
— ST. ISHMAEL'S AND THE LOST TOWN OP 
HAWTON 

Four rivers have their aher in the inlet of Car- 
marthen Bay, watched by St. Ishmael's Church on 
one side and Llanstephan Castle on the other — the 
two Gwendraeths, the Towy and the Taf. Of these 
the Towy is a great stream ; indeed, there is none 
in Wales, wild or sober, fairer in variety, richer in 
memory. The other rivers are tributary to it. To 
quote Leland, " Tave semith to cumme at full sea 
to the mouth of Towe River, but at low water 
marke a man may perceive how it ha(steth) to the 
se on the sandis hard by Towe." 

In fact, this triple inlet, shaped rudely like a 
starfish with three curved limbs pretty visible, the 
fourth and fifth being lost in sand and water 
between Cefn Sidan and Laugharne sands, con- 
tracts and dilates in a surprising way with the ebb 
and flow. Looking from Ferry side or from St. 
Ishmael's at low water, you gaze upon miles on 
miles of sand. Then at times with a strong south- 
west wind behind, the tide comes up at a gallop 
and fairly races along the railway embankment. 
At spring-tides you meet it unexpectedly in the 
shape of frothy waves under the sandy railway 



220 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 



arch, where the sand has been dry and the bits of 
seaweed have been brittle for weeks before ; and 
I have seen it flow on and turn the high-road 
within and below the railway bank into a river. 
If you have been tempted out at low-water a mile 
or two on the beach where the cockle-pickers go, 
you may have to use strategy and skirt shoal- 
water to get safe home. In good aspects of the 
sun these tidal sand-deserts have a quite beautiful 
light bright colouring, with a dancing kind of 
radiance that suggests a mirage and some lost 
town like Hawton quivering in middle-air with 
more roofs and pinnacles than ever it had of old. 

To the inbound mariner these sands, beloved of 
small boys, cockles, and flatfish are a bother and a 
danger. If his schooner escape Cefn Sidan it may 
get sand-bogged at Warley Point. Hear the Com- 
plete Sailor's warning : " No vessel should try to 
make Laugharne or Carmarthen without a pilot." 
And again, speaking particularly of the Towy : 
" To take a vessel four or five miles through an 
invisible channel not more than three cables wide, 
with a tide running four or five knots, and break- 
ing sea on either side, can only be done by an old 
hand." 

One afternoon, with a blue-and-white sky, the 
wind nor'-westerly, and the tide swimming in 
broad and strong, we hired a sailing-boat, and 
tacked out into the bay, seeing Llanstephan Castle 
and the dark waterside wood and Lord's Park 
slide away from us like a dream. As we sailed on, 
we saw an infinite number of jellyfish — pale blue, 
purple, orange, white — like globes of submerged 
light, deep in the water. Our bare-legged boat- 
man had humorous blue eyes and a face brown as 
an Arab's. He told us, in reply to such idle ques- 



. 



THE TOWY AND FERRYSIDE 221 

tions as landsmen ask, how three whales once 
came into Carmarthen Bay, and a tale his father 
had of a foreign ship, the Stadveldt, wrecked on 
Carmarthen Bar, and five hands drowned. He 
much preferred, however, to talk of the cockle- 
women of a certain Cockletown, and their habits. 
He laughed slily as he told us they were very 
angry if their men did a stroke of work beyond 
cooking the dinner ; and on Sunday they went to 
chapel like ladies, in silk and satin, with big gold 
brooches and great jewelled earrings to deck them 
out. He said " Tref-y-Cocos " had laws of its own ; 
and the people were so clannish, they never married 
out of their tribe. Some other hearsay reports he 
gave us of their marriage customs, which sounded 
like a bit of Herodotus. Evidently " Tref-y-Cocos," 
which you will not find on the map, is a place 
apart, where the cockle-shell middens entrench a 
set of inhabitants who are not Welsh, Flemish, or 
English, but simply " Pobl-y-Cocos " — cockle-folk, 
primitives. 

Although the open country about Ferryside is a 
little bare and monotonous, it is broken near the 
sea by typical Carmarthenshire cwms and small 
valleys. Of these you have a good instance in 
Melin Cwm, beyond Ystrad Bridge on the Carmar- 
then road. The road up the cwm diverges on the 
left from the main road, and leads past a mill and 
an old-style wayside inn, and so to Iscoed Park. 
A Maen-llwyd stands in the park above. This road 
goes on to Llandefeilog, one of the true old-style 
Welsh agricultural villages. Several of the 
Llandefeilog farm-houses, e.g., Nant y Llan, which 
formed part of the monastery, are very well worth 
examining. An old fishing-weir was formerly held 
by the lord of the manor, and the villagers were 



222 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

allowed its use. The church, dedicated to St. 
Maelog, is ten centuries old, and even the 
Methodists have a chapel (formerly belonging to 
the Established Church) which dates from the 
fourteenth century. About a mile from the village 
is an old eye- well, on a tenement called Pistyll, in 
the lordship of Cloigin. 

Ferryside has no popular antiquities : even its 
church — a chapel-of-ease to St. Ishmael, built in 
1828, rebuilt in 1875 — is new. Yet it has its tradi- 
tions. It used for a time to be known as St. 
Thomas's, because the church is so dedicated ; but 
its real past is bound up with St. Ishmael's, where 
you still hear stories of the wreckers who watched 
Cefn Sidan sands like wolves, or of the old village 
of Hawton, and its foundation-walls seen at low 
tide. Hawton, it is said, was originally defended 
from the sea and the sea-sand by a range of 
burrows which gradually gave way before wind 
and water, till at last, at some desperate inunda- 
tion, the village was devastated. 

Dangerous as it may appear to strangers, the 
cockle-pickers of Ferryside and Llansaint at the 
ebb tide treat the farthest stretches of the wet 
sands, a mile or more out, like honest terra firma. 
They and their carts may be seen for long hours at 
their cockle-picking. Indeed, one recalls the stoop- 
ing forms of the cockle-women, minutely outlined 
on the pale, shimmering, sandy levels where the 
kittiwakes run and whistle, as a constant part of 
the picture. These cockle-women are a stout, 
hard-working, and exclusive folk, who hold dear 
their privileges and the old customs of the cockle- 
grounds. Their mouths are full of Welsh proverbs 
and scraps of folk-lore ; and Llansaint is their 
metropolis, a pure village of cockle-pickers. St. 



THE TOWY AND FERRYSIDE 223 

Ishmael's in the old days was their cathedral ; it is 
a rude, impressive structure, curiously expressing 
the place where it stands. The interior is like 
some profound ecclesiastical crypt or cavern, 
sombre and austere to a degree ; on a hot summer's 
day its coolness is delicious. The parish register 
goes back to 1561, and contains some incidental 
entries as to great storms and loss of shipping on 
the 26th and 27th of November, 1703, and the 
corn-famine in 1597, which are of extra-parochial 
interest. 

A railway-crossing will be found leading to the 
sands a little below St. Ishmael's Church ; and one 
can return by the sands when the tide is out 
instead of keeping to the high-road. You pass 
on the way a piece of aboriginal architecture in 
the Cockle Rock— so called, we were told by a 
smiling lassie, " because cockles cannot climb it ! " 

If you are stationed at Ferryside, Llanstephan 
Castle becomes your one inevitable landmark and 
neighbourly sentinel across the water. You never 
tire of the rude coronal it makes on that shapely 
hill. It draws you imperceptibly back into the 
Middle Ages, when every castle held its castlery 
at its peril, when the "Fair Family," the 
" Tylwyth Teg," still lived in the woods about 
Laques, and when Merlin himself was still rein- 
carnating himself in the spirits of the Welsh 
poets, who wished to prophesy the return of 
Arthur or Owain Lawgoch, or the fall of London. 

Approaching the Vale as the Normans originally 
did, we perceive how well Llanstephan Castle was 
posted (three hundred feet above sea-level, or 
two hundred feet higher than Kidwelly Castle) to 
command the mouth of the Towy and the sur- 
rounding lands. Not much of the real interior, 



224 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

despite its commanding proportions as seen from 
below, remains but the outer walls or curtains 
between the towers, the gate-tower, the keep, 
and some of the vaulted chambers in its base- 
ment. Compare it with Kidwelly, and you 
realise how much has perished through the wear 
and tear of time and no doubt the free quarry- 
ing of its stone for building farm walls and folds. 
The view is an enchanting one from the top of 
the keep — whose staircase, though broken, is still 
available — or from the western walls, which do 
not rise insurmountably above the ground-level 
of the Castle-close. Ferryside and St. Ishmael's 
and the high grounds above define the old region 
of Llangyndeyrn, across which the Welshmen 
once swept in force to harry the deer of 
Kidwelly and besiege the Castle. 

According to Welsh tradition, the first stone 
castle on this site was founded by Uchtred, a 
Welsh lord in the early Norman days ; but the 
hill was probably stockaded centuries before the 
Normans fought and built their way into -the 
country. Having got to Kidwelly, they must 
have seen at once the strategic value of Llan- 
stephan. The first Norman castle may have been 
only a palisaded tower, strengthening the main 
point of an earlier earth-fort. It was not until 
the time of the Barons de Londres that it gained 
its completer form, as shown by the present ruins. 
In 1143, the three bold sons of the lord of Towy, 
Griffith ap Rhys, Cadell, Meredydd and Rhys, who 
had grown practised in upsetting the Norman 
chess-board, made a determined attack on the 
Towy strongholds. Carmarthen Castle taken, 
they marched south, leaving Rhys-y-Gors alone 
for some reason, and beset Llanstephan by night. 



















ME9 






,.,' . 
























, ' '•'$ 














■i _: 





THE TOWY AND FERRYSIDE 225 

The Normans could easily convey a signal to the 
garrison at Kidwelly. At any rate, a strong force 
advanced from the east, and crossing the Towy 
attacked the besiegers. But the three sons of 
Griffith ap Rhys beat off this counter-attack, and 
then took the Castle. 

St. Anthony's Well may be reached in the dip 
on the south-west side of the Castle by the path 
that skirts the foot of the Castle Hill, hugging 
the steep brink above the beach. The Well has 
preserved, for a wonder, the old stone-work and 
the niche where the Saint's figure stood. The 
water used to be thought of sure and miraculous 
effect, and is still used by the country-folk for 
eye-complaint. A pin, or some equivalent, had 
to be dropped in the water by the sick visitor. 
A pin is nothing to us ; but think of the far-come 
pilgrim kneeling there and praying in the time 
when a pin was an old country woman's precious 
thing. 

From St. Anthony's Well the path carries one 
onward to the slopes of Parc-yr-Arglwydd, the 
next hill, southward and seaward to that on which 
the Castle is posted. This affords a finer sea- 
outlook than the Castle Hill. But the best high 
pitch in the neighbourhood is on the road 
to Llanybri, a village situate two miles inland 
and north-west of Llanstephan, nearly five-hun- 
dred feet above sea-level, which has a small 
modern church, erected by the family of Laques. 
The old house, called " Laques " (pron. " Lax "), 
mentioned by Drysdale, was a seat of the same 
Lloyds that lived at the Plas for so many cen- 
turies. They gave up the Plas when Sir William 
Hamilton became owner there. The old " Plas " 
was on another site, a little lower than the 

15 



226 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

present house. As you look at the fair sur- 
roundings of the Plas at Llanstephan you can 
recall the figure of Nelson, who was a guest there 
of the Hamiltons. On one occasion he and Lady 
Hamilton drove into Carmarthen to see Edmund 
Kean play at the small theatre in the town. 
The physician, Sir John Williams, who lived until 
lately there, collected at the Plas a noble library 
destined by him for the nation, which has gone 
to the National Library at Aberystwyth. 

Llanstephan is noted for its sweet chime. 
Thirty or forty years ago an amiable visitor, 
Mary Curtis, described the church : " In the 
north transept is an aperture closed in ; from 
its looking directly to the altar, it must be a 
hagioscope. Through this, in Romish times, those 
who sat in the transept could see the priest at 
the altar and the holy things. Squenches is a 
name sometimes given to these apertures, but it 
is not the proper word. Where the vestry is now 
was a large door before the restoration of the 
church, though which the coffin was conveyed 
to the place of burial. On the north side of the 
altar are the ancient tombs of the Lloyds, of 
Laques, and of the Meares family, in a sort of 
aisle, which was once distinct from the church." 

The same writer tells us, too, of the "very ancient 
house called ' Plas Brych,' Bryd or Brodyr, said 
to have been the residence of monks." 

When we were youngsters, the eight-mile jaunt 
by road from Carmarthen to Llanstephan was a 
recognised holiday adventure. The village inns 
then, I remember, would be surrounded by a 
motley collection of vehicles ; while inside tea 
and cockles and other mightier viands supplied 
continual relays of feasters, who set off home 



THE TOWY AND FERRYSIDE 227 

in the evening part singing along the darker 
roads, or listening to a treble-voice — 

"Dos di ati, dywed wrthi, 
Mod i'n wylo'r dwr yn heli." 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE TOWN OF CARMARTHEN — A CLARE CASTLE — 
MERLIN'S TREE — DICK STEELE 

As you can sail up the Towy lazily to Carmarthen 
quay in a coasting-vessel, wind and tide favouring, 
you may add the town fairly to your Welsh coast 
route. It lies about eight miles from the mouth 
of the Towy, on whose north bank it is grouped 
above the meadows like a demurer garden city, 
with more white and brown and grey about it 
than the very red red-brick now favoured by the 
urban builder. If only the Castle had not been 
so amerced by time, the town, standing over the 
river, as it does, would still have some signs of a 
tower-crowned mediaeval front to present to the 
wayfarer approaching by the old bridge. You 
may judge of the effect it had when Dick Steele 
retired here to end his days from the queer print 
by Bucke reproduced (see p. 230). 

In Carmarthen it fell to the present writer 
to spend several of his early years, beside many 
intermitted months afterwards, when the town 
was the base for holiday expeditions. During 
part of the time we lived in a spacious old house 
in Nott Square, which had been a bishop's palace. 
The house had an individuality which had sur- 
vived the modernising of its street-front. Under- 



THE TOWN OF CARMARTHEN 229 

neath it was the undoubted crypt of a chapel 
of Edward IV. 's time, and in a deeper niche was 
a well which was served with a chain as I 
remember it, and which we believed to be bottom- 
less. It was positively a house to favour the 
romantic faculty, and our maids dreamed 
dreams and told tales. Acres of attics, opening 
on a roof with a scrambling path on the leads, 
helped to give effect to the legend of a bishop 
told by one old servant, Hannah. According to 
Hannah, one of the bishops who lived here was 
a bad wicked man ; and he had a wife, although 
it was forbidden priests to wed ; so he hid her 
in the attics, where, poor lady, afraid both of 
her husband and his enemies, she made away 
with herself. The story, whether authentic or 
not, left us afraid of dark cupboards and passages 
as the day went. We half-feared to see the 
bishop's white lady, as she had been described 
to us, appear in her night-dress carrying the rope 
with which she hanged herself. 

The town was very poorly lit in those days, 
with dim and infrequent street-lamps. But their 
flame, such as it was, had a deep orange colour 
which accorded well with the evening greys and 
umbers. One lamp stood nearly at our door, 
and looking up, it cast the dappled, wavering 
pattern of the tall drawing-room windows upon 
the ceiling and gold cornice with an effect that 
was both disturbing and enchanting to our fancies. 
Through that pale reflected other-window we 
looked into we knew not what — some other 
town with other people, paler and fainter than 
the real men and women. Another lamp guarded 
the corner of the square where a narrow street 
led to the inbuilt entrance and hidden gateway 



230 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 






of the Castle, blocked by mean roofs, houses, and 
market-inns. This narrow street, as it twisted 
its way down to the quay, clung close to the 
Castle walls. At the quay usually lay two or three 
of the coasting-vessels that brought coal and 
timber to the town, moored below the bridge. 
The Castle, I grieve to say, had long before my 
time (in 1789-1792) been turned into the county 
gaol ; and its river frontage was hid by a huge 
blank disfiguring gaol-yard wall without a single 
tower or other determining feature to break and 
relieve it. In the day when the country wakes 
to the pleasure of its own history and its memorial 
buildings, it will restore to the town the approach 
to that fine gateway, an end to a street vista of 
which any place that cared two pins for its archi- 
tecture would be proud. 

The Castle, mainly a Clare Castle, dates from 
about 1140 ; but in a more primitive way it kept 
guard before that, the site being one of those 
naturally pointed out for use by its command of 
the river approaches. The Britons used it in their 
own way ; the Romans used it in theirs ; the 
Welsh and the Normans used it turnabout long 
after the last Romans had gone. 

You best realise the Castle in its extent by look- 
ing at the plan in Speed's map of the town, 1610. 
The courtyard was a large one, with three flank- 
ing towers, a fine keep and unusually spacious 
apartments and living-rooms at the north-west 
corner. There was no gate, I believe, on the 
north side where the ominously shut gaol-gates 
are now, looking towards Spilman Street. The 
chapel attached to the Castle, St. Edward's, must 
have been a very fine one, to judge by the crypt 
in the cellars of the Sheaf Inn. 



THE TOWN OF CARMARTHEN 231 

Before the Clare Castle one was built out of a 
yet older fort to seal the first Norman advance 
about 1083. This held its place, and stood siege, 
for some thirty-three years. Still earlier, in 1079, 
the Welsh chroniclers say that Gwilim Vastard — 
William the Bastard, William the Conqueror — 
had been on pilgrimage to St. David's. If so, no 
doubt he paused at Carmarthen on the way ; and 
if we accept that record, we are driven to connect 
the Castle of 1083 with his journey. For when 
William I. went on a pilgrimage he kept a keen 
eye to other sites than those of the churches he 
passed. The Castle held its own until the day 
when Owain, son of Caradoc, was deputy castellan 
for its Norman owner. It was then that Gruffydd, 
son of Rhys ab Tewdwr, who had lately returned 
from Irish exile, appeared on the scene. Another 
prince, the son of Cynan, had been giving him 
harbourage in the north, but had promised 
Henry, who feared the Tudor intrigue, either to 
give him up or to have him quietly put away. 
Luckily a servant carried secret news of this 
treachery, and he escaped just in time, flying to 
Aberdaron where the Church gave him sanctuary, 
and so making his way south. Then the mesh was 
drawn round him in the south. Henry, hearing 
that he had escaped and made a stand in Strath 
Towy, sent Owain, son of Cadwgan, and another 
chief in pursuit. The Vale or Strath of Towy 
seems only a scone for a pastoral, but its cross 
glens, leading off into wild country, often sent 
armed bands swooping down upon the town-gate 
and citadel of Carmarthen. One of these bands 
under the young prince, who had escaped Henry's 
snares, surprised the Castle at the end of this 
episode, and Owain, Caradoc's hopeful son, was 



232 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

killed on the ramparts as he stood. Owain was 
deputy castellan for the Norman lord. 

Failing your chance of going to gaol in the 
Castle and so scaling its walls, the tower of St. 
Peter's Church is your best point of vantage 
whence to see Carmarthen to-day. There with 
the aid of Speed's map and a little local fantasy 
you can discern not only the old parish bounds 
and the old town within the parish of St. Peter, 
but you can see the old inhabitants of the town 
parading in contempt of history, Merlin and Dick 
Steele among them. 

Carmarthen, as its Welsh name with its play 
upon "Merlin" or "Myrddin" (Caer-Fyrddiri) 
shows, is probably a Welsh echo of a British 
place-name. The Latin names Muridinum and 
Maridunum hint at the derivation. Ptolemy gives 
us the first, Antoninus the second. Roman roads 
run east, north-east, and west to and from Car- 
marthen, whose traces are pointed out below, as 
the names Sarnau (causeways), Pensarn (head of 
the causeway), &c, declare. When the Romans 
went, the Welsh no doubt resumed the place, 
fighting amongst each other as Welsh custom was. 
We conjure up Merlin here to fill the historical 
gap ; and leap some centuries to reach the year 
when Gruffydd of the Tudors attacked and took it. 
Having taken the Castle, he sacked the town, but 
made no effort to keep either, and drew to a 
hold at Dinevor. After this, Carmarthen Castle 
saw more fighting than fell to the lot of any other 
castle in this district, owing to its position in a 
region perfectly formed for Welsh warfare. In 
1137 it was taken by Owain Gwynedd ; in 1143 by 
his sons, including Howel the Tall, the poet, a rare 
castle-breaker. In 1159 it was besieged by Rhys 



THE TOWN OF CARMARTHEN 233 

ab Gruffydd, Prince of Dyfed, but the siege was 
raised by a formidable combined force, Norman 
and Welsh. 

Nott Square, at the south end of King Street, 
was formerly High Street, and here stood the 
town-stocks and a cross, within a few feet of the 
site now occupied by General Nott's monument. 
At this cross it was that Bishop Ferrar suffered 
martyrdom on March 30, 1555. Foxe, in his Book 
of Martyrs, says it was in the market-place he 
was burnt, on the " south side of the Market- 
cross," which some local writers have placed near 
the Priory. But as the old street-market was held 
chiefly in the High Street, not far from the gate 
of the Castle, and there was a cross where we 
have indicated, little doubt is left about it. 

The writer's grandfather described to him the 
aspect of the town as it was when the market- 
stalls were spread on a Saturday or a fair-day, with 
one stall for hats including the " het befr," or 
tall Welsh hat, and others for Welsh homespun, 
and yet others for the good brown pots and pans 
from the local potteries. You could buy eggs 
then for twopence or threepence a dozen, and a 
nice Nantgaredig fowl for tenpence, and a fat 
duck for a shilling. Taylor, the " Water Poet," 
visited Carmarthen on his last journey, and 
waxed eloquent over its good fare and low 
prices : — 

"Butter, as good as the world affords, 2id. or 3d. the 
pound ; a salmon two foot and halfe long, twelve pence. 
Biefe, l^d. a pound ; oysters Id. the 100 : egs 12 for a 
penny. A little money will buy much, for there is nothing 
scarce dear or hard to come by but tobacco pipes." 

The two back streets that continue the line of 



234 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

King Street and Nott Square down through what 
is (still called Bridge Street to the quay and the 
bridge show the old characteristically narrow 
chief approach to the town from the bridge. On 
the extreme left, next to the " White Lion," and 
abutting on its yard, we come upon an unexpected 
bit of the old Castle. Near the Castle gates 
the market used to be held in the space of Upper 
Market Street, now Nott Square, and this was 
the heart of the old town. 

Descending Lower Market Street to Guildhall 
Square, you pass the site of old St. Mary's Church 
at the Guildhall, and what was St. Mary's Street, 
now the Guildhall Square, to the Dock Gate, the 
old north-western gateway of the town. And 
turning to the right out of the extreme corner of 
the square, and bearing to the left through Red 
Street, you come to the present market ; on 
Saturday forenoon a bustling scene with its rows 
of market-women and its hearty show of country 
produce and Welsh flannel and Carmarthen cloths. 

At the north-east side of the town, standing 
well among its trees at the meeting of many 
streets, St. Peter's Church is the best memorial 
left of old Carmarthen town. The spacious four- 
teenth-century building that we discern now 
includes large portions of an earlier one ; instead 
of aisles it has two naves, one of which is much 
older than the other. The tower is tall and 
massive. The interior is unusually full of monu- 
ments and mural tablets. The most remarkable, 
the tomb of Sir Rhys ap Thomas and his wife, 
was conveyed here from the old Priory Church, 
when the ruins of that vanished landmark were 
desecrated in the early eighteenth century. 

There is no inscription now on his tomb, but it 



THE TOWN OF CARMARTHEN 235 

might run : " Here lies Sir Rhys ap Thomas, Ruler 
and Governor (under favour of Henrys VII. and 
VIII.) of all Wales ; Chamberlain of Carmarthen 
and Cardigan ; Seneschal of Builth, Haverford- 
west and Rhoose. He fought in five battles, held 
the most famous tourney ever seen in Wales — at 
Carew — left innumerable children, and died in 
1527 full of years and honours ; escaping by a 
timely death the mortification of seeing the dire 
change already impending in the fortunes of his 
family." 

Another tomb, less defaced by age and time, 
shows us the effigy of a praying lady, the Lady 
Vaughan, with an impressive, curious epitaph 
which begins — 

' ' Kinde Reader Vnderneath this tomb doth lye 
Choice Elixar of rnortalitie." 

If one leaves St. Peter's by Priory Street, one 
passes the old Priory site hidden behind the houses 
on one's right, and then reaches presently, in the 
dip of the street where the Oernant brook flows 
out, "Merlin's Tree" — a last remnant of the oak, 
propt now and set on a base of mason-work — 
with a new tree growing up beside it. And there 
one may drink in, if one can, that very breath of 
mystery which the Silurist's brother drank in 
elsewhere. According to old tradition : — 

"When Merlin's tree shall tumble down, 
Tumble then shall Mei-lin's town." 

There is a reference to the Tree in a much later 
rhyme : — 

" Three sailors pass, by the Water-Gate, 
And sing of Merlin, as it grows late. 



236 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Last night they sailed the Irish Sea, 

The bitter sea, in a wild twilight 

Where its tide swims north to Enlli's strait ; 

From the Water-Gate to Merlin's Tree 

They sing to-night 

Of Merlin's death and Annwn's might." 

Sir Richard Steele's connection with Carmarthen 
was through his second wife, Mary Scurlock, only 
daughter of Jonathan Scurlock of Llangunnor, 
and it was only the last four or five years of his 
life he spent here. One cannot but speculate on 
the effect of the sequestered life of a small 
country squire at Ty Gwyn under Llangunnor Hill, 
upon the soldier, essayist, poet and wit. He had 
lived through the follies and excitements that 
a campaign in the Low Countries, much lively 
commerce with the London stage, a give-and-take 
partnership with Addison, and many quarrels 
and bitter jealousies, and encounters with men 
like Swift, had formerly provided. It was Swift 
who said of him (in the "Satire on Dr. Delaney"): — 

"Thus Steele, who own'd what others writ, 
And flourish'd by imputed Wit, 
From perils of a hundred Jayls 
Withdrew to starve and dye in Wales." 

But Bishop Hoadly of Hereford, where Steele 
lodged for awhile before retiring to Carmarthen, 
said of his friend that he retired to retrench in 
his living and save money so as to "do justice 
to his creditors." At any rate to Carmarthen 
he came, apparently with a view to settling down 
for good, in 1725 or 1726 ; and though he paid 
visits to Hereford, he returned to London no 
more. A stroke of paralysis made him feeble in 



THE TOWN OF CARMARTHEN 237 

both mind and body in the last three years of his 
life ; but a pretty picture is given of the sick man 
by Victor, who writes : " I was told he retained his 
cheerful sweetness of temper to the last, and 
would often be carried out in a Summer's evening, 
where the country lads and lasses were assembled 
at their rural sports; and with his pencil give an 
order on his agent, the mercer, for a new gown 
for the best dancer." Steele died in 1729, Sep- 
tember 1st, at a house standing, some say, on the 
spot where the Post Office now stands, and which 
was converted, after his death, into an inn, the 
" Ivy Bush " — not to be confused, of course, with 
the present " Ivy Bush " in Spilman Street. 

What should be said of Steele's Carmarthen 
wife — his " Dear Prue," his pretty, peevish Prue — 
spoilt child, wilful and shrewd, contrary and 
charming woman? We must be kind to her 
memory, for his sake and because she was a 
Carmarthen girl, and must have known its streets 
as a little maid, quite as well as she knew St. 
James's or Hampton Court afterwards. Her 
" little disputes " with her husband notwithstand- 
ing, she must have found life entertaining in his 
company, for he went on being an ardent, whim- 
sical lover long after he had become her husband : 
indeed, to the end. " I love you better," he wrote, 
"than the light of my eyes, or the life-blood of 
my heart." He wooed her to good temper with 
walnuts and coach-rides. " Dear Prue," he wrote 
once, " I send you seven pen'north of walnuts at 
five a penny. Which is the greatest proof I can 
give you at present of my being with my whole 
Heart yrs. Rich d * Steele." But the thirty-five 
walnuts had diminished by the time the letter 
was sent off, for he wrote outside it, " there are 



238 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

but twenty-nine walnuts." Next day he sent her 
fifty more, and sent his " service " to Binns, who 
was Prue's companion and confidante, and there- 
fore to be carefully propitiated. That was in 1708. 
Lady Steele does not seem to have made any long 
visit to Carmarthen after her marriage until 1716, 
when she returned there to look after her pro- 
perty, leaving her husband and children behind. 
She was said to be not an excessively fond 
mother, but he wrote gay, impulsive letters about 
the children during her absence ; now to tell her, 
"your son is mighty well employed in tumbling 
on the floor of the room and sweeping the sand 
with a feather." Now, again, Betty and Molly, 
the two girls, have been with him in Paradise 
Row, eating strawberries and cream, in apprecia- 
ting which he showed them (he is careful to tell 
us) a father's good example. Meanwhile she 
continued her coyness, even at a distance, and 
often sent him cold letters. When she does relax 
for a moment, and call him " good Dick," it makes 
him almost ready to forget his gout, and walk 
all the way down to Carmarthen. She was not 
happier without him than with him. She quar- 
relled with her servants and her Welsh relations. 
Her nerves gave out; hereditary gout declared 
itself. She left Carmarthen and returned to Lon- 
don at the close of 1717 ; and before another year 
was ended she had ended her strange tale. By 
the contrariety of fate the Carmarthen wife was 
buried at Westminster Abbey, and her husband, 
the London wit, play- writer, Tatler, at Carmarthen. 
Let the following lines of her writing, which are 
to be seen, scribbled on a scrap of paper, among 
the MSS. at the British Museum, serve to con- 
vince us that there was more under her moods 






THE TOWN OF CARMARTHEN 239 

and fancies than most of Steele's biographers 
have allowed : — 

" Ah, Dick Steele, that I were sure 
Your love, like mine, would still endure ; 
That time, nor absence, which destroys 
The cares of lovers, and their joys, 
May never rob me of that part 
Which you have given of your heart : 
Others unenvy'd may possess 
Whatever they think happiness. 
Grant this, O God, my great request : 
In his dear arms may I for ever rest." 

Betty, or Elizabeth, the only child of the mar- 
riage that survived, who is said to have joined her 
mother's beauty to her father's wit, married a 
Welsh judge, John Trevor, who became Lord 
Trevor of Bromham. Prior to this she was the 
cause of a duel between two less fortunate suitors. 

Sir Richard Steele was buried in the old family 
vault of the Scurlocks, which is near one of the 
doors of St. Peter's Church. To realise what the 
Carmarthen of Steele and his wife was like, we 
may take Bucke's well-known view of the town, 
and picture houses with gabled roofs and narrower 
streets, and the still up-standing towers of the 
Castle above the bridge. Then, starting from the 
middle of King Street, we can take our way over 
the bridge to Llangunnor, where he lived in 
Ty Gwyn, now a farm-house. I remember as a 
youngster staring in on a hot day through the 
lattice of the dairy windows at the cool white 
pans of milk and cream. 

Another reminiscence is of the Fair Days in the 
town, particularly of John Brown's Fair (I never 
learnt who John Brown was), when the horses 



240 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

and cattle used to stand tethered to the railings 
of St. Peter's, and when you would see a horse- 
couper bringing a great horse at full trot down 
King Street to show off his paces, and shouting 
" Hi, hi, hi ! " to ware the crowd. " John Brown's 
Fair" still flourishes, and is known as far away 
as Norfolk and Stagshaw Bank in the county of 
Durham. 

John Taylor, the "Water Poet," whose list of 
market prices has already been quoted, was very 
nearly lost on his road to Carmarthen on his 
Welsh travels. He was then an old man, and as 
he takes pains to tell us, he was miserably horsed. 
Missing his road as the day went, he had contrived 
to flounder into a bog or quagmire. 

" I had much adoe," he writes, " to draw myself 
out of the dirt or my poore weary Dun out of the 
mire. ... A horseman of Wales that could speak 
English overtook me and brought me to Caermar- 
den and good entert n at (the) house of one Mistris 
Oakley. ... A good large town with a def encible 
strong castle and reasonable haven for small barkes 
and boats, which formerly was for the use of 
good ships, now it is much impedimented with 
shelvs, sands, and other annoyances ; it is said 
Merlyn the prophet was born there." 



CHAPTER XXIII 

RHYD-Y-GORS — THE TALE OF THE THREE PILGRIMS 
— ST. CLEAR'S AND THE ROMANCE OF THE 
BEAUTIFUL MISS BURNES — LAUGHARNE AND 
PENDINE — HOWEL THE GOOD, AND PWYLL 
PRINCE OF DYVED 

Going by train west from Carmarthen, you leave 
the Towy behind as you cross the bridge between 
Johnstown and Llanllwch, keeping fairly close 
thereafter for some distance to the high-road, 
which, again, dogs the old Roman road, the " Via 
Julia." If you are quick enough you can just 
surprise a glimpse on your left, immediately the 
bridge is crossed, of a comfortable-looking house 
(an outpost of the lunatic asylum) below the rail- 
way level. The house stands on the disputed site 
of a lost castle, famous in the record Rhyd-y-Gors 
("Ford of the Bog"). Not quite two miles south on 
the river cliff, overhanging the zigzagging main 
road to Llanstephan and its castle, is Castell Moel 
("Bald Castle"), better known as Green Castle, 
where a farm-house is girt about by some of the 
chambers of a Tudor mansion. On my visit there, 
one Saturday afternoon many years ago, a farm- 
boy and girl and one or two children were the 
sole garrison, their elders having gone to market. 
They showed me the house, but had only a con- 

16 241 



242 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

fused tale to tell about the ruins, in which Roman 
soldiers seemed to be contemporary with Rebecca's 
Daughters. 

But meanwhile the railway has left Towy side, 
and begun to climb and make its way through 
the green hills that divide the watershed of the 
Towy and the Taf and some of its tributaries, the 
Cywyn, the Dewi Fawr, and the Gynin. Reaching 
the Cywyn, you find at the aber, whence it flows 
into the Taf estuary, two churches, which it helps 
to name, Llanfihangel- and Llandeilo-Abercoioyn, 
the latter another of the places dedicated to 
St. Teilo. In Llanfihangel Abercowyn churchyard 
is a triple grave with a very strange legend 
attached to it, which as you con it over makes 
you wonder about the old Pilgrim's Way to 
Menevia. 

Three pilgrims journeying to St. David's fell sick 
here of the plague, and, afraid of being left un- 
buried, decided that the least sick of the three 
should put an end to and bury his companions 
in a grave into which he too was finally to creep. 
But in the end the pains of death gat hold on him, 
and he was unable to adjust the slab over the 
grave. How much of the story is true ? Possibly 
the grave was ransacked, and the story invented 
to explain the displaced covering-stone. Not 
many years ago a woman in Brittany committed 
suicide by digging a grave and partly covering 
herself with earth, and pulling down a slab over 
all. As for this unhappy haven, it used to be said 
that while the pilgrims' grave was well tended, 
and kept clear of weeds, the little peninsula would 
flourish and be fruitful. But church and church- 
yard have for over half a century been helped on 
their way to ruin. A new church, Victorian and 



RHYD-Y-GORS, LAUGHARNE, PENDINE 243 

inglorious, but better placed, serves Llandeilo 
Abercowyn now. 

The village of St. Clear's, which you reach after 
the seven-mile run from Carmarthen, is your best 
point from which to invade Llanfihangel Aber- 
cowyn. St. Clear's is one of those lazily-straggling, 
long-drawn villages which often perplex the tired 
vagabond in South Wales. Such a man accosted me 
on an ancient plea opposite the " Mariner's Arms " 
about half-way down the interminable street. He 
was very dusty — and, I fear, very thirsty. He said 
he had tramped all the way from Milford — "God- 
strewt he had ! " 

St. Clear's is so called " after Santa Clara, an early 
sister of the Church, who founded a church here in 
St. David's time " (?). Leland speaks of a castle at 
St. Clear's, which is now only to be traced by the 
mound called "Banc y Bailey," where perhaps the 
keep stood. The present church is of all dates and 
memories. A sister of James I., Lady Drummond, 
lies buried in the chancel. A small Cluniac cell, 
served by a prior and two monks, was founded 
here in 1291. At the Dissolution its land went to 
All Souls, Oxford, which still maintains a tithe- 
claim on the parish. 

An extraordinary tale, that might almost have 
been adumbrated by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is told 
of St. Clear's. It begins — a good opening ! — a year 
or two after the Battle of Waterloo. A mysterious 
party arrived one day at the " White Lion," and 
after careful inspection took a house called " The 
White Cottage." The party included a lady who 
walked lame and used crutches, her daughter, a 
beautiful girl who passed as Miss Burnes, and a 
young man, a son, who looked delicate, and who 
was rarely seen, being absorbed, it was said, in 



244 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

chemistry. Presently, when Miss Burnes had be- 
come a great favourite in the neighbouring society, 
uneasy rumours about bank-note forgeries on Car- 
marthen banks gained vogue. A suspicious pocket- 
book, dropped by Miss Burnes, stuffed with £5 and 
£10 notes, gave a clue. But her party had suddenly 
disappeared meanwhile. At Bath the young lady 
was detected passing a forged note : her brother 
was traced to Bristol, all three were thrown into 
prison, and the ladies, being tried first, were sen- 
tenced to death. However, the son's trial came on, 
and he vowed they were absolutely innocent, and 
he was the guilty person. In the end, he was 
hanged, and they escaped with a year's imprison- 
ment. Their heartlessness in regard to their 
doomed confederate excited much comment. The 
sequel is the strangest part of the story. Miss 
Burnes became travelling companion to a lady of 
rank — met at Florence the heir to an earldom, who 
fell in love with her ; married him, and died— a 
countess. While in Carmarthen prison this in- 
teresting figurante is described as wearing a 
wonderful grey silk frock cut in Spanish fashion, 
and draped with a black lace shawl, while a small 
velvet cap adorned one side of her pretty head. 

Laugharne is reached via St. Clear's Station, from 
which brakes run regularly to the town ; for a 
town it claims to be, with the officers and para- 
phernalia of a borough. It lies snug at the mouth 
of the Taf, the inlet where that stream and the 
Towy and the two Gwendraeths mix their waters 
with the sea. Town-street, castle, church, and 
quay— all have a demure air of past importance. 
A hundred years ago Laugharne was as busy a 
small seaport as you could wish to see ; and in the 
reign of Queen Elizabeth it was counted as " one of 



RHYD-Y-GORS, LAUGHARNE, PENDINE 245 

the six chief towns in all Wales, being then larger 
than Cardiff ! " In William IV.'s time, if we accept 
the exaggerated estimate, Laugharne even passed 
for fashionable ; a smaller Tenby, with something 
of a busy county town added. Miss Curtis, in her 
Antiquities, lamenting the change that had come 
over the place in her day, says : — 

"Nearly all the wealthy and ancient families are gone. 
About forty to fifty years ago Laugharne presented a lively 
scene : the carriages of the rich rolled by its houses ; in the 
morning and afternoon the different families walked up and 
down the street from the Mariners' Corner to the houses with 
bay windows, just past the Vicarage on the opposite side. 
Parties often concluded the day. Malkin, who was here in 
1803, said it was the best built town in Carmarthenshire." 

The same writer draws a picture of the town on 
market-day with the farmers and their wives and 
daughters, coming in from Llanboidy and other 
parts, on horseback, " seated on a sort of cushion 
called a pannel, with large bags of striped woollen 
stuff, some full of corn, others of oats, swung on 
each side of the horse. The boys made many pen- 
nies by holding their horses. The corn and oats 
were sold to the different storehouses, and were 
then shipped to Bristol." Fortunately Laugharne 
has not lost everything with its striped corn-bags, 
sea-going trade, and retired gentility. Cover Cliff 
and Warly Point still stretch their necks into the 
sea, and the path along the side of St. John's Hill 
still stares across at St. Ishmael's and Cefn Sidan 
and Worm's Head. If the Devonshire coast and 
Lundy Island are also seen rain may be expected 
shortly, say the fishermen. 

Laugharne Castle is now part of a private house, 
and its inner works unluckily can only be seen by 



246 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

special favour. Wogan Street, which leads to it, 
brings us to the site of one of the old gateways 
which made the town formidable. The outer 
bailey of the Castle was extended to the church 
gates, and there the principal gateway of the 
Castle stood ; and another gate stood at the 
Mariners' corner. Wogan Street, stretching from 
the Castle to the Island House, represents the old 
street which here, as elsewhere, grew up within 
the shadow and under the strong arm of the 
Castle. 

Laugharne Castle may be best seen, externally, 
if you walk down the beach below when the tide is 
out, or take boat at high water and row round the 
harbour. Then it still has a stern military air. Its 
effect, you will find, is much increased by its mix- 
ture of square and round towers — work of different 
periods. 

An earlier castle than the present was founded 
by Rhys ap Gruffydd on what is said to be a 
Roman site. Rhys entertained Henry II. here on 
his return from Ireland in 1172. King Street is so 
called after that monarch. In 1215 the Castle was 
in Norman hands ; for Llewelyn the Great sacked 
and burnt the place. Then it was, probably, that 
Guy de Brian began the building we now see, 
having already had the castlery as a grant. From 
the Brian family it passed to the Devereux family : 
then to the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, and so to 
the Percys. It remained with the latter until the 
attainder of the sixth Earl of Northumberland, in 
Elizabeth's reign, when it passed to the Crown. 
Then Sir John Perrot, that " bold and free-tongued 
gentleman," who claimed to be a natural son of 
Henry VIII. , was made castellan of Laugharne ; 
and so remained until, in his other role of Irish 



RHYD-Y-GORS, LAUGHARNE, PENDINE 247 

purgator and deputy, he was accused of uttering 
disrespectful words against the Queen, and en- 
couraging the rebellion of O'Rourke and other 
Irish malcontents and Romish priests. He said 
" he had from impatience, and not from a disloyal 
heart, uttered words against the Queen." Popham, 
the Attorney-General, found him guilty, though 
unjustly. Leaving the tribunal, he said, " God's 
death ! will the Queen suffer her brother to be 
offered up a sacrifice to the envy of his frisking 
adversaries ? " The Queen seemed inclined to 
pardon him, but he expired in the Tower, Septem- 
ber, 1592, six months after his condemnation. 

The Castle stood intact until it was battered 
in the Civil War. Laugharne folk declared Crom- 
well (or the devil in his likeness) besieged the 
Castle in person. His soldiers raised batteries on 
Fern Hill, and in a field called New Park. Finally, 
the water was cut off, and the Castle fell ; General 
Laugharne (whose family took their name from 
the place), pluckiest of turn-coats, fought on both 
sides, and first took the Castle for the Commons, 
and then held it for the King. This second siege 
was that when Cromwell is said to have been 
active. When the Castle fell it was dismantled 
and partly burnt by the Roundheads, whose 
cannon-balls have frequently been found. 

Laugharne Church, St. Martin's,' was another of 
castle-builder's design, with embattled tower. It 
was rebuilt, in something like its later form, by the 
De Brians. The interior is well worth sketching. 
Originally the floor rose in three separate pitches 
towards the altar ; but this feature, with many 
others, has gone under the various repairs and 
restorings. The painted ceiling of Laugharne 
Church was one of " the sites of the place " when 



248 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

our grandfathers went to stay there. Notice the 
monuments of Guy de Brian and Sir John Powel. 
The effigy in the north transept is that of Lady 
Palmer, who met with a strange death, " from a 
reaping-hook concealed in a hay-field." This part 
of the church is sometimes called " Palmer's aisle." 
A figure of St. George has gone from one window ; 
a portrait of Edward III. still appears in another. 
An old yew-tree near the south entrance was called 
the "fox-tree"; and here all kinds of vermin used 
to be nailed. In the parish register is an account 
of the prices paid for the heads of the vermin. 

Pendine has, I believe, the longest sands in 
Wales, and for two miles or more they are fine and 
hard and ridable, horse or cycle. They have tall 
cliffs and tidal caves to back them too, and many 
green approaches, through sea cwms, as one 
ranges west toward Marros. The village has no 
great accommodation for visitors, but the inevitable 
bungalow has made an entry now. 

If you approach Pendine by the upper road 
from St. Clear's, through Eglwys Cymmyn, you 
have a formidable descent to make from the 
high grounds on the eastern side of Marros 
Mountain. To the wheelman this is likely to 
prove a snare, if he is continuing his road west. 
Thinking to avoid the huge ascent back to the 
high-road, I tried to ride the sands round to the 
next corner, but only to find the tide coming up 
at a hand-gallop ; and finally I had to make an 
ignominious return, hauling the machine over the 
boulders and through salt water ; and the adven- 
ture, amusing in the recollection, was a trying one. 
The tides at Pendine make a considerable difference, 
you will find, to your resources if you stay there, 
as they cut off the approach to the cliffs and caves 




X .5 

3 I 

D 2 

-1 3 



RHYD-Y-GORS, LAUGHARNE, PENDINE 249 

by the beach round Dolwen Point. There is a 
footpath over the cliff shoulder, however, which 
you can take from the cliff road above the Spring 
Well. 

Pendine used to be a favourite spot for the 
farmers to visit on their holiday-after-harvest fete, 
and it was a common thing to see numbers of gigs, 
carts, and dogcarts drawn up at the inns. The old 
road to Laugharne, skirting the burrows, was a 
very rough one. The " Laugharne Waggon," fifty 
years ago, was drawn by three horses abreast, and 
needed it, especially on market-days. 

The Pendine Cliffs end at Gilmin Point; the 
name is said to be due to the fact that formerly, 
during the time of religious persecution, "people 
used to assemble here for divine worship ; on one 
occasion a preacher named Gilman stood at the 
entrance of the cave, called the 'pulpit,' and 
preached to a thousand people. 'Beacon's Hill,' 
over Gilmin Point, is so called from lights having 
formerly been placed there, for the heartless pur- 
pose of wrecking ships. Old inhabitants 'remember 
the men going on horseback, with a lantern tied 
under the horses' heads for this object.' " 

The sea-cwm at Morva Bychan can be surprised 
from the beach if the tide permit ; and the 
hazel-copses and underwoods that vary the Marros 
Mountain wildness are like cool streams to the eye 
on a hot summer day. If the cwm is followed about 
half-way, and the road taken straight on when the 
cwm twists to the left, it brings you to the Green 
Bridge, below the new hostelry that stands on 
the bank. The road passes over the " Bridge " — 
a nine-days' wonder — but you must descend on the 
upper side to the stream to see its waters disappear 
within the magic cavity. Emerging fifty yards 



250 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

further down, the stream makes its way through 
Morva Bychan valley to the sea. 

The road for Llanddowror rises gradually as you 
leave St. Clear's behind, then descends again from 
Craig Wen. The name of a former Vicar of Lland- 
dowror falls sooth on the ear. Griffith Jones 
was of those devoted souls who work, no matter 
what the discouragements, for the love of God and 
man. There is no mistaking the church, lying low 
on the left of the highway as you descend into the 
village. 

The church, dedicated to St. Cringat, is a simple 
building, lately restored. The interior — plain nave 
and chancel — does not look, superficially, like that 
known to Griffith Jones, for its small space was in 
his day yet smaller, being half eaten up by high- 
backed pews. 

When Griffith Jones came to Llanddowror in 
1716, the ignorance of the country people gave a 
shock to his perfervid mind. He conceived the 
idea of bribing them — as there was great distress 
in the land — with halfpenny loaves dispensed in 
the church porch, to come to him and be taught 
to read the Bible at least. Out of this hungry 
beginning in 1730 grew the Welsh " Circulating 
Schools," whose masters were itinerant for a time. 
Then schools were stablished, village and parish, 
and thousands of people taught ; 10,000, it is said, 
was the number in the year of his death, 1761. A 
good woman, Madam Bridget Beavan of Laugh- 
arne, aided him in the work. She it was who 
erected the tablet to him on the south wall of the 
church ; and she was, at her wish, buried near his 
grave. His tomb is in the chancel, and was moved 
to make more space for the altar; but his remains 
actually lie under the floor of the nave, below the 



RHYD-Y-GORS, LAUGHARNE, PENDINE 251 

communion rail. Madam Beavan left £10,000 at 
her death in 1779 for carrying on the schools, 
which money after much litigation went eventually 
to their maintenance. 

If the wayfarer pauses under the wall of the 
village school on a summer forenoon he may hear, 
as I did, the youngsters' fresh voices chiming out 
a sort of babe's litany. It seemed to me the best 
11 In Memoriam " that Griffith Jones could have. 

From Llanddowror over a league of climbing 
road, now tracing a stream, now dividing green 
copses, leads on to Red Roses. The place is on high 
ground, five hundred feet above the sea, and a flying 
glimpse of the place promptly declares that there are 
no roses there. The name is akin to that of Marros 
Mountain, and comes from " Rhos," a moorish fell, 
and not from the red rose at all. Five roads cross 
at Red Roses. That turning off to the left winds 
and zigzags its way through Eglwys Cymmyn to 
Pendine, while another forks to the right at the 
upper Pendine Inn, leading to Marros village. 
Eglwys Cymmyn means Bleak Church (?) it is said, 
because of its exposed site. A monument to Sir 
John Perrot is in the church ; and Peace Park and 
Parc-y-Castell in the parish recall its fighting days. 

You leave the sea if you go on to Whitland, the 
Ty Gwyn or White House of Hywel Dda or Howel 
the Good, greatest of Welsh lawgivers. It is 
another instance of the way in which we still 
follow old habits in Wales, that Whitland, which 
Howel found a good meeting-place for the coun- 
cillors called together out of the Welsh commots 
and hundreds, should now be a junction of railway 
lines. Whitland to-day makes little of the associa- 
tions gathered about it, but it is not wonderful 
that the old " Ty Gwyn " has left no trace, since 



252 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

it was a timber building which could be moved 
almost as readily as an Eisteddfod pavilion to-day. 
Imagine a hall, with oak and beech-trees for 
columns, a forked branch at the top serving to 
carry the long roof-tree, and side walls of stout 
poles and wattle-work forming the aisles. In 
winter a great fire burnt in the centre, its smoke 
rising through a " simdde louvre," or sheer opening 
in the thatched roof. Walls and roof were white- 
washed, completing this White House ; and the 
door at the end was wide and high enough for 
a mounted horseman to ride in erect. Afterwards, 
the Abbey perpetuated the name of " Ty Gwyn 
ar Taf," although built on a different site from 
Howel's house. It was a Cistercian house ; its 
remains make part now of a country house and its 
purlieus. 

Having got to Whitland, you are again on the 
verge of romance-country. Narberth, a plain, 
demure country town at first sight, is a place 
of renown. The long and broad descending High 
Street brings you, if you persist, to the upstanding 
mound of the Castle Hill, and reminds you that the 
old Welsh name of the place was Castell-yn- 
Arberth, afterwards reduced to Narberth. Older 
people will still call it Arberth. Sir Andrew Perrot 
built the present Castle, which consists of a gate- 
way and two towers, and some dilapidated curtain 
and partition walls. 

But the original Castell was far older. We read 
in the Mabinogion how Pwyll, Prince of Dyved, 
lord of the seven cantrevs, " was at Narberth, his 
chief palace, and he was minded to go and hunt, 
and the part of his dominions in which it pleased 
him to hunt was Glyn Cuch. So he set forth from 
Narberth that night, and went as far as Llwyn 



RHYD-Y-GORS, LAUGHARNE, PENDINE 253 

Diarwydd. And that night he tarried there, and 
early on the morror he rose and came to Glyn 
Cuch. . . ." Later in the tale we hear of a mound 
above the palace called Gorsedd Arberth. This 
mound, to be sure, was an enchanted one ; but 
you should turn now to the Mabinogion and read 
there of the " lady upon a white horse, in a 
garment of shining gold," who could not be over- 
taken, and of the wonders that she brought about. 
You will picture her, Rhianon, as she throws back 
her hood and reveals her lovely face to Pwyll, 
when at length she halts for him to come up with 
her. You will hear her then, in the time of her 
mysterious penance for the great crime she had 
not done — murdering and devouring her son ! — 
hear her as she sits on the horse-block near the 
gate of the palace in Arberth, telling with down- 
cast eye and mournful voice her terrible tale. 

Grove, near Narberth, was a house of Colonel 
Poyer, who was shot after his brave defence of 
Pembroke Castle, as you will hear when we get 
there. The railway line, as it leaves Narberth, 
crosses high ground and then begins to burrow 
after the stream that issues at Amroth. When 
you reach Begelly you have Amroth two miles 
away on the left, and have passed by on the same 
side Kilgetty and its deer-park. Approaching 
Saundersfoot, you are running over the last patch 
of the coal-measures in the country, whose work- 
ing is seen in sundry small collieries hereabouts. 
Saundersfoot village lies down in a sea-hollow, 
quite hidden away from the upper main road to 
Tenby, where you reach the limestone rock that 
gives the town so much of its character and 
waterside vantage. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

TENBY: THE OLD TOWN AND THE NEW — PROUD 
GILTAR — LYDSTEP HAVEN AND CALDY ISLAND 

A strong fortress and a walled town, a decent 
borough for centuries, and an elect watering-place 
since about the year 1785, Tenby has, after a 
rather dull period during a part of last century, 
taken out a new lease of fame. Its name comes 
from the Welsh — " Dinbych y Pysgod " (small city 
of fishes), which truly describes its amphibious 
circumstance. Built on a rock, it has at high tide 
the salt water flowing nearly all round it ; and the 
freshest of salt-sweet air, mild, yet not relaxing, 
tonic but not cold, fills its lungs. Sometimes, no 
doubt, the wind is boisterous, but this only makes 
the adventure of the Castle Hill and the High 
Street more amusing. Sometimes too it is said to 
rain (average rainfall about thirty-six inches) ; but 
this only adds to the hydropathic advantages 
expressed by the sea and the " Marine Baths " in 
St. Julian Street. Finally its coast, from Saunders- 
f oot round to St. Govan's and the Stack Rocks, and 
on to Angle, is so notoriously picturesque ; its 
rural neighbourhood is so verdurous and so be- 
castled, that a dozen summers spent here need not 
exhaust its charms. 

254 



TENBY : THE OLD TOWN AND THE NEW 255 

As you look on Tenby town from the Castle Hill, 
you may try in vain now to recall what the old 
walled town was like before the idle and fashion- 
able Tenby came into being. But the old walls 
and towers, as one encounters them in the circuit 
of the old streets, still give a serious air of history 
to the place. The old town, says a writer who 
wrote before the railway came, was well fortified. 
One of its gates " leading towards Carmarthen is 
encircled with an embattled but open-roofed tower, 
after the manner of Pembroke. The extent of the 
wall on the land side, which encloses only a part of 
the town, is 512 yards, and the height about 
21 feet ; this was furnished with embrasures, and 
flanked by two square and five semicircular 
towers. The south wall rises high above the level 
of the sea at high water ; and through one of the 
semicircular bastions is an entrance into the town, 
by a passage called Southgate, formerly defended 
by an iron portcullis. Northgate having fallen 
into decay, has been removed ; hence the Old 
Town and Norton, or Northtown, form one con- 
tinued street. Besides these gateways there are 
two more on the sea side, one leading to the pier, 
and the other to the south sand. 

"The religious establishments of the town and 
suburbs have been numerous. There was an 
hospital, or free chapel, of St. John's, founded by 
William de Valence and Joan, his wife. A lazar- 
house in the suburb, dedicated to St. Mary 
Magdalen, was endowed about the year 1230 by 
Gilbert Marshal, with lands for the relief of the 
lepers received therein. An almshouse was com- 
menced by Anselm, successor in the earldom to 
Gilbert, but not completed. A convent of 
Carmelite friars was founded by John de Swyne- 



256 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

more in 1399, 22d Richard II., called St. Mary's 
College." 

The South Parade still gives one an idea of the 
town wall, with the antique details oddly varied by 
the back-doors of certain inns and hostelries, 
which pierce it at intervals. The most curious- 
looking feature of the wall to-day is the gateway, 
called the " Five Arches." Three of these were 
made, however, in much later days than those 
when the gate was built. The original arch was 
that facing the South Parade, with a rounded top 
to it. The portcullis slot is still to be seen in the 
stonework. The walls, as they stand, are of 
various dates. One portion dates (as a wall-tablet 
near the fire-station shows) from Queen Elizabeth, 
and was built, it is suggested, by Sir John Perrot. 

From Castle Hill on a clear day with a good spy- 
glass you can see not only Caldy Island near by, 
and Lundy Island far away, but you can make out 
Amroth Castle, Llanstephan Castle, and Kidwelly 
Castle, with many churches and other humbler 
landmarks, and see the Burry River at flood turn 
pale blue under the north-east corner of Gower. 

The Castle ruins on Castle Hill are meagre : a 
rude tower of primitive aspect, with a later tower 
adjoining it, after a fashion to puzzle the antiquary, 
and a few walls of uncertain date, are all. The 
bare surroundings do not help to enhance the 
effect of the ruins. 

The " Brut y Tywysogion," Chronicle of the 
Princes, mentions one attack at least on a still 
earlier castle than the present : one in 1151, when 
when two of the " fighting Rhyses " — Rhys and his 
brother Meredydd, sons of Gruffydd ab Rhys — 
surprised it, and put its castellan and his men to 
the sword. In later times, as the town grew and 



TENBY : THE OLD TOWN AND THE NEW 257 

strengthened its walls, the Castle was enlarged. 
Its final fall came in the Civil War. Bombarded 
by the Parliamentary ships-of-war in 1643, it was 
strong enough to hold its own. This was no small 
glory for the Pembroke men ; but in 1648 another 
attack, more boldly and elaborately contrived, sent 
it down. Town and Castle passed from the King 
to the Commons ; and the Castle was put out of 
the reckoning, so far as any further warfare went. 

Now the Castle-keep helps to register by its 
gauges and glasses those things which seaside folk 
always find interesting — wind and weather, rain 
and sun — things that affect, too, the decay of towns 
and castle walls like Tenby's. 

The monument on the left is a Welsh counter- 
part to the familiar Albert Memorial at Hyde 
Park. The arms of Llewelyn the Last, the Red 
Dragon of Cadwaladr, with the legend "Anorch- 
fygol Ddraig Cymru " (" Unconquerable Dragon 
of Wales ") appear upon it. 

New Tenby began to be about two hundred 
years after the date last cited, and it owes that 
beginning to a gentleman who was none other 
than the proverbial, mythical, but in this case 
quite authentic, "John Jones." A doctor and a 
bachelor of medicine of Haverfordwest, he was the 
man locally to discover the sea as " a benignant 
hygienic and hydropathic monster." In November, 
1781, the Corporation granted him a lease of St. 
Julian's Chapel, which stood on the old pier. This 
was a Sailors' and Fishermen's Chapel, intended as 
a place for them to confess their sins and pray 
before putting to sea. Now in the last half of the 
eighteenth century, although the rector of St. 
Mary's claimed toll on all fish landed, he did not 
trouble himself to serve the chapel. The Tneby 

17 



258 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

fishermen thereupon declared "No prayer, no fish ! " 
and the chapel fell into neglect and was in a bad 
way evidently in 1780 when John Jones bethought 
him of the new function it might be made to 
serve. At any rate, he turned it into a bathing- 
house, and so it remained till in 1805 Sir William 
Paxton built his sumptuous baths. These were 
burnt down almost before they were occupied, but 
others were built in their place. In 1812 Fenton 
describes Tenby as a town half in ruins, and 
various accounts show that in the rejuvenating 
of the place, which went on vigorously after that, 
the old walls and gateways were quarried to build 
some of those solid Georgian terraces which still 
remain. It is worth note that the Carmarthen 
Gate, which stood where the Royal Gate House 
Hotel and the Lion Hotel now stand, commanding 
White Lion Street, was pulled down in the same 
year in which John Jones got his lease of St. 
Julian's Chapel — in 1781. 

Tenby parish church commands you to halt in 
High Street as you enter Tudor Square. Entering, 
you are first attracted in the interior by the 
imposing flight of ten steps which lead up to the 
altar. The wooden roof of the chancel, richly gilt 
originally, was a late addition, and indeed the 
building is of various dates and periods, Norman 
to Early English, Transition to Perpendicular. 
The tombs provide a sort of history of the town 
written in stone. Here is one to the famous old 
burgess stock of the Whites, which is set in the 
arch on the right of the altar steps. Its alabaster 
panels are a miniature family portrait-gallery 
worth study, and the two marble effigies above, 
dressed in the costume of Henry VIII. 's time, 
commemorating John and Thomas White, help to 



TENBY : THE OLD TOWN AND THE NEW 259 

suggest the Tenby that strengthened its walls and 
was a fat borough. Another curious family tomb 
is that to the wife of Thomas ap Rees, of Scots- 
borough, which shows that good knight on his 
knees, his lady on her side, and a " praty " brood 
of little Reeses below. Another tomb is that of a 
Tenby red-gowned alderman, William Risam, who 
lived out his life here while Shakespeare was living 
his in London and Stratford. Local gossip declares 
that Cromwell, thinking the effigy a living man, 
shot at him, and that the dent of the bullet is in 
the wall. But the most extraordinary tomb I 
know is one near the entrance door in the north 
aisle — the effigy of the one absolute predestined 
ascetic in the unforgetable guise of death and 
emaciation, a thing not to be forgotten till the 
spectator is out on the south sands surrounded by 
the babble and gaieties of the living. 

As for the amphibious delights of Tenby, are 
they not all duly set forth in the guide-books, 
which tell you, too, how to reach the Museum door, 
guarded by two notorious ship-heads from old 
wrecks ? There you may see the results of the 
labours of the local antiquaries and others. Tenby, 
its frivolities notwithstanding, has always been a 
conscious student of itself and its neighbourhood, 
its bone-caves and sea-creatures ; and many a 
rarity is lodged here as a result in this quiet 
corner of the old Castle buildings. In the lower 
room you will find strange remains of the men we 
know so little about — the Stone Men — with many 
arrow-heads, hammers, and stone lances, from the 
collection of a former Rector of Gumfreston, the 
Rev. Gilbert Smith. Notice, too, the relics dis- 
gorged by Hoyle's Mouth and the quarries of 
Caldy Island or dug out of Longbury Bank Cave 



260 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

by the author of Little England Beyond Wales, 
Mr. Edward Laws, and Professor Rolleston. Mr. 
Laws once actually picked up a bone of a mammoth 
on the South Sands, and other surprising " finds " 
have been made by Tenby men. 

In the same room you have a selection of the 
wild birds and queer sea-fowl of the Pembroke- 
shire coast in the Mathias Collection, and a choice 
array of the Tenby shells, due to the shell-hunting 
of Captain Lyons, who has given his name to one 
rare small shell, the Lyonsia. Upstairs there are 
moths and butterflies, coins and tokens, and a set 
of prints and old water-colours. The old town as 
it was before the advent of Dr. John Jones and 
Paxton and the Georgian builders is made con- 
temporary in the water-colour drawings of Charles 
Norris and other pictures. 

Leaving the Museum, you will be glad of a windy 
walk to the old pier, where there is generally some 
small bustle of boats and yachts coming and going, 
or to the Victoria Pier, where the Bristol and 
Waterford steamers or the Ilfracombe boat may 
happen to be due. Safe as Tenby Harbour and its 
sea-roads seem now, it has seen portents in its 
time. French privateers have been captured in 
the very harbour ; pirates and smugglers have sold 
rare wines and fine silks to the cellars and ward- 
robes of Tenby. 

The folk-lore and the local traditions, if they are 
disappearing, are not yet forgotten. You may 
even get a native to sing you "Says Milder to 
Melder," the Song of the Hunting of the Wren : — 

"'Oh, where are you going?' says Milder to Melder, 
' Oh, where are you going ? ' says the younger to the 
elder ; 



TENBY : THE OLD TOWN AND THE NEW 261 

'Oh, I cannot tell,' says Festel to Fose ; 

'We're going to the woods,' said John the Red Nose. 

'We're going to the woods,' said John the Red Nose. 

' Oh, what will you do there ? ' says Milder to Melder, 
' Oh, what will you do there ? ' says the younger to the 

elder ; 
'Oh, I do not know,' says Festel to Fose; 
'To shoot the Cutty Wren,' says John the Red Nose. 
'To shoot the Cutty Wren,' says John the Red Nose. 

'Oh, what will you shoot her with?' says Milder to 

Melder, 
' Oh, what will you shoot her with ? ' says the younger 

to the elder ; 
'Oh, I cannot tell,' says Festel to Fose; 
'With bows and with arrows,' says John the Red 

Nose. 
'With bows and with arrows,' says John the Red 

Nose." 

Many wholesome seasonal customs flourished in 
the town of Tenby, and not so long ago. On 
Christmas Eve crowds used to assemble in the 
streets, march in procession, blowing cow-horns. 
Then long before " morning light " on Christmas 
Day the young men met with lighted torches to 
accompany the clergyman to the church, when 
the service was held which is still kept up in one 
or two Welsh villages and called " the Plygain." 
And on New Year's morning the boys and girls 
knocked at the house doors early with their " New 
Year's Water," which they drew fresh from a 
well and carried in a tin or mug. With it they 
sprinkled the persons and even all the apartments 
of a house in return for small coin, using little 
branches of evergreen for the purpose. One of 
the songs sung by the children who carry the 



262 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

"New Year's Water" is most imaginative, most 
musical — 

"Here we bring new water from the well so clear, 
For to worship God with, this happy new year ; 
Sing ' Levy dew, levy dew, the water and the wine ! ' 
With seven bright gold wires and bugles that do shine ; 

Sing reign of fair maid, with gold upon the toe, 
Open you the west door and turn the old year go ; 
Sing reign of fair maid, with gold upon her chin ; 
Open you the east door and let the new year in. 

Sing ' Levy dew, levy dew, the water and the wine ! ' 
With seven bright gold wires and bugles that do shine." 

The words levy dew are, some say, a corruption 
of the Welsh lief i Dduiv — cry to God ! The 
second verse appears to figure the sun setting and 
sun rising, along with the going of the Old Year 
and incoming of the New. 

You meet more geologists than you do folk- 
lorists at Tenby, and indeed fossil-hunters have a 
good hunting-field in the neighbourhood. Water- 
wynch Bay can be visited when the tide is at half- 
ebb ; the cliffs there, although nothing so fine as 
Lydstep, make a bold setting for the small bay ; 
the Raven Cliff and the rocks at hand suggest 
that the Saundersfoot coal-measures are approach- 
ing. Fossil ferns are to be had in the "Fern 
Rock." Beyond the Monkstone it is impossible 
to pass save at the very lowest of low tides, and 
the way back from Waterwynch to Tenby by the 
beach is not to be followed save at ebb of the 
high spring-tides. 

Tenby has inland caves besides those on the 
shore. Hoyle's Mouth has not the charm of a sea- 



TENBY: THE OLD TOWN AND THE NEW 263 

washed cavern, but it is the largest and geologi- 
cally one of the most extraordinary of all the 
limestone caves that Pembrokeshire can boast. 
If the little Ritec stream could be followed it 
would bring us to the bank where lies Hoyle's 
Mouth. A bicycle lamp will prove of service in 
exploring the interior, which extends for fifty 
yards in a series of chambers, the third and last 
of the three usually visited being the largest and 
finest. The view from the opening, which is wide 
and spacious, is very striking. The interior, once 
noted for its fine stalactites, has suffered in being 
ransacked for the bones and cave implements and 
the " finds " now lodged in Tenby Museum. 

Local gossip declares the cave runs all the way 
underground to Pembroke Castle. Science says 
it was, like its neighbour, Longbury Bank, used of 
old as a cave-dwelling. Longbury Bank lies under 
an irregular copse-clad knoll at the top of a rough 
grassy ascent. The cave is pretty near the top of 
the bank, and a funnel opens and leads up to the 
field-level from its roof. 

Another half-mile and you are on the verge of 
Lydstep Haven, whose sands lie in the crook of 
Lydstep Point. The caves lie beyond the Point, 
and you descend the cwm, passing the old lime- 
kiln and the quarries, to reach them — two of 
them right in the nose of the promontory. By 
following the cwm down past the upper caves to 
the beach, you have the " Droch " and Natural 
Arch on your right, and the Smuggler's Cave and 
two smaller tidal caverns on the left. Here the 
extraordinary rock-shapes and precipices are 
flanked by a sea-shore full of sea wonders, 
minute crustacean creatures and microscopic 
dragons. 



264 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Wandering this part of the coast, we are bound 
to call up again the boyish figure of Walter 
Savage Landor, whom we already intercepted on 
the shore of Swansea Bay. At Tenby he met 
Ianthe and Rose Aylmer — 

"Rose Aylmer whom these wakeful eyes 
May weep, but never see ; 
A night of memories and sighs 
I dedicate to thee." 

From Ianthe he borrowed a book which gave him 
the idea of his Gebir. Now knowing how and 
where he wrote it, we are led while we read to 
translate some of its Arabic back into Welsh 
scenes : — 

' ' I since have watch'd her in each lone retreat, 
Have heard her sigh and soften out the name ; 
Then would one change it for Egyptian sounds 
More sweet, and seem to taste them on her lips 
Then loathe them: Gebir, Gebir!" 

So, too, thinking of the poet himself, we read 
how Gebir — 

" . . . when his passion had subsided, went 
Where from a cistern, green and ruin'd, ooz'd 
A little rill, soon lost ; there gathered he 
Violets and harebells of a sister bloom, 
Twining complacently their tender stems 
With plants of kindest pliability. 
These for a garland woven, for a crown 
He platted pithy rushes, and ere dusk 
The grass was whiten'd with their roots nipt off." 

If you are fanciful enough, you may discover 
near Manorbier the very spot to which these 
lines of Landor refer. 



TENBY : THE OLD TOWN AND THE NEW 265 

Caldy Island, which Tenby considers her own, 
has latterly become again the headquarters of a 
religious order — the Benedictines of the English 
Church. The Brothers have published an account 
of their settlement, which, whether you accept their 
eremitic religious doctrine or not, you will find 
worth pondering. The book is called The Bene- 
dictines of Caldy Island {Formerly of Painsthorpe, 
York), and it is published at the Abbey there. 
The aims of the Brotherhood may be shortly 
resolved into three : " Quietism, Adoration, and 
Prayer ! " They migrated thither in 1906 from 
Painsthorpe, having the Old Priory and Church of 
Caldy to give them temporary shelter. Since then 
they have built a Guest House, and made a 
beginning with their larger monastery. At the 
pleasant Guest House religious guests who are 
like-minded with the Benedictines, and wish for a 
Retreat, may stay at no great cost. 

The early history of Caldy so far bears out the 
rude impressiveness of the Priory Church as to 
make good the tradition of the island. The 
Welsh called it Ynys Pyr, or at times Llan Illtud. 
Illtyd we know. Pyr is believed by Sir John 
Bhys to stand for Porius, the same who lies 
buried under a tumulus at Trawsfynydd in 
Merioneth. The local ties of the name are 
strengthened by the Lives of the Saints. In the 
life of Samson, Bishop of Dol, Pirus is said to 
have founded a monastery not far from that of 
St. Illtud. Allowing for the slight confusion 
between Llantwit Major and Caldy, we have good 
grounds for connecting Illtyd with the island. 
His pupils there, says this Book of the Bene- 
dictines, included St. Gildas ; and among the 
companions of Gildas were St. Paul Aurelian of 



266 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Leon, St. Samson, St. David, St. Malo, and St. 
Brieuc. St. David in another account becomes 
Deiniol. The string of Breton and Welsh names 
is seen to be close tied when we come to trace the 
religious and seafaring commerce of the two lands, 
and the resolving of chiefs and knights into sea- 
hermits and of actual legends into Arthurian tales 
with Welsh, Breton, and Cornish backgrounds. 
The legend of Caldy is a very real expression of the 
place : it is the tale of the monk cribbed within a 
narrow isle, an isolated "llan," or old church-close. 



CHAPTER XXV 

GERALD THE WELSHMAN AND "THE FAIREST SPOT 
IN WALES" — MANORBIER — GERALD'S WALES — 
CAREW CASTLE AND THE GREAT TOURNAMENT 
OF SIR RHYS AP THOMAS — SLEBECH AND THE 
KNIGHTS OF ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM 

Now to the sound of a militant horn and an 
urgent church-bell enters the intrepid and amazing 
figure of Gerald the Welshman — Giraldus Cam- 
brensis. When you reach Manorbier in the course 
of your travels and take the long road from the 
station down to the green village and the sea-cwm 
across which the Castle and its stern bride the 
Church confront one another, you are on the verge 
of a charmed domain. Long may the builder, the 
tourist, and the expropriating twentieth century 
keep their irreverent hands off its green places. 
n Gerald was born there in or about the year 1147, 
youngest son of Angharad and William de Barri, 
and grandson of Nesta, the " Helen of Wales," as 
she was called, and of Gerald de Windsor. He 
came, as you see, of the pick of two races, Welsh 
and Norman ; and he was gifted in mind, fair in 
body, of heedless wit and consuming energy. His 
affection for his birthplace he expressed in an 
intensive figure — a narrowing down of the world, 
and of Wales to one chosen spot, Manorbier. " As 

267 



268 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Dimetia is the fairest of the Welsh lands, and Pem- 
broke the fairest part of Dimetia, and this the 
fairest of Pembroke, it follows that Manorbier is 
the sweetest spot in Wales." 

He was a very handsome creature, and he gloried 
in it. "Is it possible so fair a youth can die?" 
asked Bishop Baldwin when he first saw him. It 
was with Baldwin, when he had become Archbishop, 
that Gerald went on the Itinerary, preaching 
the Crusade, which fills the best of his books. The 
page about Manorbier with its wild and curious 
Pyrric derivation of the name cannot be omitted 
from the chronicle : — 

" The castle called MaenorPyrr, that is the mansion of Pyr- 
rus who also possessed the island of Chaldey, which the Welsh 
call Inys Pyrr, or the island of Pyrrus, is distant about three 
miles from Penbroch. It is excellently well defended by turrets 
and bulwarks, and is situated on a summit of a hill extending 
on the western side towards the sea-port, having on the 
northern and southern sides a fine fish-pond under its walls, 
as conspicuous for its grand appearance, as for the depth of 
its waters, and a beautiful orchard on the same side, inclosed 
on one part by a vineyard, and on the other by a wood, 
remarkable for the projection of its rocks, and the height of 
its hazel trees. On the right hand of the promontory, between 
the castle and the church, near the site of a very large lake 
and mill, a rivulet of never-failing water flows through a 
valley, rendered sandy by the violence of the winds. Towards 
the west, the Severn Sea, bending its course to Ireland, enters 
a hollow bay at some distance from the castle ; and the 
southern rocks, if extended a little further towards the north, 
would render it a most excellent harbour for shipping. From 
this point of sight, you will see almost all the ships from 
Great Britain, which the east wind drives upon the Irish coast, 
daringly brave the inconstant waves and raging sea. This 
country is well supplied with corn, sea-fish, and imported 
wines ; and what is preferable to every other advantage, from 
its vicinity to Ireland, it is tempered by a salubrious air." 



GERALD THE WELSHMAN'S COUNTRY 269 

- The Castle buildings you see now are not those 
celebrated by Gerald, who was born in a much 
simpler building, of far less apparent consequence 
than that marked by the present jumble of ruins, 
mediaeval and Tudor, set about the well-ordered 
lawns of a modern country house. A tower, a 
moated ward within a curtain wall, and possibly a 
gatehouse, are all we can recover of Gerald's boyish 
House of Paradise. The place was innocent alike 
of the greater walls of the military fortress and 
the much later domestic buildings at the south- 
west end, with the apartments that Mr. Cobb has 
restored below and the stone roof and curious 
chimneys above. The roof can be ascended by the 
stairs from the old dining-hall ; its curious strong 
stonework would certainly have pleased Gerald, 
had it existed in his time. But, of course, this part 
of the Castle was not built till centuries later. 
Sceptics even say Gerald was born in a rude wooden 
castle built upon or near the old camp on Oldcastle 
Point. 

• If we take Mr. Cobb's account, the square south- 
west tower was built by the same men that built the 
church tower, and at a time when men were pro- 
digal in building. Then, the curtain-wall was built 
over the foundations of earlier walls, and the lower 
chapel or crypt which dates from Gerald's time (?). 
Parts of the hall are, or appear to be, Norman ; and 
the vault leading to the water-gate replaced the 
great beams of a wooden floor, which belonged to 
the Norman ponderous style of early castle-building. 
The square tower that flanks the gate-tower is 
probably early too. The gate-tower itself is later, 
built on the earlier bare walls, however, of an older 
one. The strange thing is that so much of the 
earlier Castle remains, while so much of the later 



270 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

apartments, with enriched details certainly not 
Norman, has gone. What became of them ? Were 
they carried off for farm buildings, or, most 
mysterious of all, shipped away to build (as an 
ingenious antiquary has suggested) a mansion on 
the opposite coast ? * 

Manorbier Church makes the perfect companion 
to the Castle. Norman in its nave and tower, it has 
Early English work to show in its aisles and tran- 
septs. The chantry was built some time after the 
tower. The tower was entered by the rood-loft or 
by a ladder : those who withdrew into it for defence 
drawing up the ladder after them. The chantry 
was converted into a schoolroom about sixty years 
ago. Which of the later kindred of Gerald is the 
knight whose effigy, a figure in a surcote and mail, 
we see in the aisle ? Probably he is late thirteenth 
century. 

Carew Castle lies over four miles slightly north- 
west from Manorbier. Going from Pembroke, you 
cross half-way the old coaching high-road to Hobb's 
Point, where you can see Nash Church, which has a 
Crusader's tomb to show you. A mile and a half 
further on the way to Carew you pass at Milton 
the head of another pill or creek of the Milford- 
Cleddau estuary. The next turn to the left leads 
to the Castle, which stands well posted above the 
bridge at Carew Pill, into which the Carew stream 
discharges. 

Not many yards away from the entrance you 
have the shapely Carew Cross, left quite unpro- 
tected on the side of the road — at the mercy of 
every stone-throwing urchin whose energy needs 
an outlet. The Cross stands on a pedestal — the 

* See Arch. Camb., October, 1880, "Manorbere," by 
J. R. C, 



GERALD THE WELSHMAN'S COUNTRY 271 

Celtic twisted-osier ornament on the shaft much 
worn and rubbed. The wonder is it has not all 
gone long ago. The inscription has been read 
differently ; but it may be rendered, as by Sir 
John Rhys, " Margitent Decett f.c," or fecit crucem. 
Who then was Margitent ? Possibly an Irish 
prince who lived about 950. 

- Entering the Castle, you find there a palpable 
confusion of time and architecture — old, older, 
oldest. The old is Elizabethan ; and that is the 
square-windowed Elizabethan hall and apartments 
in the north of the quadrangle. This was subse- 
quent to the days of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, and was 
built by another knight, Sir John Perrot, who was 
a great builder and in stature a great man. For 
older you have the Henry VII. Hall, which you 
reach at the top of the quadrangle, one of a series 
of great desolated apartments once occupied in 
state by Sir Rhys. Perrot's north wing, which 
makes so imposing an effect seen from over the 
water, was never properly finished. Then for 
oldest we have the military defences, defined by 
the walls at the west end and the corner towers, 
which are of Edwardian type. The country 
round about is said to have lost much of its beauty 
owing to the destruction of the timber after 
Perrot's death, and the surroundings of the Castle 
now hardly favour the lingering tradition of the 
fine deer in the deer-park of Sir Rhys ap Thomas. 
A tennis-court serves now as a modern equivalent 
for the stately gaieties at Carew when he gave 
his famous tournament in honour of Henry VII., 
whom he had attended to Bosworth Field, on his 
journey from Milford three years earlier. 

Sir Rhys was too old to go to London for the St. 

George's Day celebrations there, and so he made a 



272 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

" princelie fete " of his own, with a chair or throne 
set for the King. To it came many valorous gen- 
tlemen, famous for " theire abilities in feates of 
armes ; and many men of prime rank who were 
lodged within the castle, with others of good 
qualitie who were lodged in tentes and pavilions 
pitched in the parke." The " time of jollitie " 
continued hospitably for five days. The first was 
spent in " taking a view of all the companie, 
choosing out five hundred of the tallest and 
ablest " ; the second, in " exercising them in all 
pointes, as if they had beene suddenlie to goe on 
some notable peece of service " ; the third, in visit- 
ing the bishop at Lamphey, and " commemorating 
the vertues and famouse atchievements of those 
gentlemen's ancestors there present " ; the fourth, 
in holding the tournament, Sir William Herbert 
being the challenger, Sir Rhys "playing the judge's 
part " ; the fifth, in hunting and hearing a sermon 
on loyalty, love, and charity by the Bishop of St. 
David's. The whole chronicle (as printed in Fenton's 
quarto) makes a most perfect, high-flown, delight- 
ful chapter of romance. We read how the " justes 
and tournamentes," the " knockes valerouslie re- 
ceived and manf ullie bestowed " ; the wrestling, 
hurling of the bar, taking of the pike, and run- 
ning at the quinteine, were ever and " anone 
seasoned with a diversitie of musicke." And 
although many prides and rivalries must have 
lurked in this feast of Carew — " among a thousand 
people there was not one quarrell, crosse worde, or 
unkinde looke that happened between them." 

Carew Castle and its estates were mortgaged by 
Sir Edmond Carew to Sir Rhys ap Thomas. The 
Carew family were Geraldines, descended from 
Gerald of Windsor and the Princess Nest, whose 



GERALD THE WELSHMAN'S COUNTRY 273 

marriage portion Carew was. Their son William 
took the name Carew (Welsh, Caerau — forts). On 
the disgraceful attainder of Rhys's grandson by- 
Henry VIII., the estates were leased to Sir Andrew 
Perrot, and then back to the Carew family, in 
whose possession they long remained. 

Carew Church, a fourteenth-century Decorated 
church with an earlier tower, lies close to the road 
that leads back from the Castle to Lamphey, in 
that part of the parish called Carew Cheriton. 
The church has many tombs of famous folk, 
Crusading lords of Carew and others. The north 
transept was used as a sort of family chapel for 
the Castle at one time. Another chapel, now a 
vestry and schoolroom, stands in the graveyard, 
and the fine old rectory house over the road now 
serves Cheriton Farm. 

If you care to extend your journey up to Cleddau 
you can go by Jeffreson, Yerbeston, and Martletwy 
to Landshipping Quay, and there cross the ferry. 
Over it lie Picton Castle and Slebech ; on gaining 
the Ha'rfordwest high-road from Narberth you 
turn east to the latter place, or west to the former, 
as you may prefer. A rough short-cut leads up 
from Slebech Park, past the fish-ponds, to Slebech 
New Church on the hill above ; but who cares to 
see a new church when old ones are to be had ? 
The Eastern Cleddau, up from Slebech Bridge, is 
richly wooded, a resort for some rarer birds that 
have bred there for time immemorial. You need 
a canoe, and a few lazy days, to explore the 
Cleddau and get to know its waterside creatures. 

A good inland voyage from Hobb's Point is that 
to Carew Castle, some five miles away. Taking 
boat at the Neyland ferry, you follow the Milford 
Cleddau main channel, passing at the end of the 

18 



274 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

first mile the old Pembroke ferry to Burton ; then 
rounding Burton Mountain — a very small mountain 
— and so as far as Lawrenny ferry, where you turn 
right and pass the quay, turning away from Benton 
Castle. It is almost worth landing at Lawrenny 
to see the church, which has a true " Pembroke 
tower." Benton Castle can be seen when boating 
up to Ha'rfordwest ; but it is not held to be a 
tourist's castle, although both the ruin and the 
demesne about it are worth exploring. Lawrenny 
does a good deal of trafficking from its quay still. 
It had at one time a fat oyster-bed in the estuary. 
The Castle at Lawrenny, as it is sometimes locally 
termed, is the modern castellated mansion, built 
on a site long associated with the Burton family, 
which stands embowered in Lawrenny Park. 
Upton Castle, due south of it, is passed on your 
left as you paddle up Carew Pill. Upton was 
once a fair castle, that served as the seat of the 
famous old Pembroke family, the Maleufants. It 
shows only the ruins of the gatehouse towers 
to-day and the interesting chapel of Upton, a 
chapelry of Nash Church. The chapel has some 
curious tombs of the Maleufants and Bowens, and 
a singular detail : a clenched fist taper-holder or 
bracket in the north wall. If you are adventurous 
enough to sail without a pilot up these creeks, you 
must be careful to bear right and south-west, 
avoiding the Cresswell creek after you pass Law- 
renny, and left all the way when you reach the 
narrowing strait above Upton, avoiding Ford Pill 
on the right and Ratford Pill in the middle, and 
keeping the left-hand channel of the three. Then, 
unless you watch the tide, you will be likely to run 
aground at points, and be stuck in the mud. 
Should you decide to explore the Cresswell creek, 



GERALD THE WELSHMAN'S COUNTRY 275 

you might find yourself investigating the top-slime 
of the coal-measures, were you to linger too long 
at Cresswell (Christ's-well). 

After making the most of the waterways in this 
holiday neighbourhood, you will or ought to find 
that, of all its places, it is Slebech affects your 
fantasy most, asks closer acquaintance and draws 
you back to its approaches. Here at Slebech was 
an old house and commandery of the Knights of 
St. John of Jerusalem, who, from being simple 
hospitallers in that sacred city, were fired to 
become knights-errant with a charter wide as 
" Christentie." There is no space here to dilate 
on the power of their open and secret confrater- 
nity: the reader who would like to know what 
their effect must have been on the mediaeval life 
of this region may turn to the very striking 
articles by Mr. Rogers Rees in Archceologia 
Cainbrensis, based upon original researches. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

* 

PEMBROKE CASTLE — COLONEL POYER — MONKTON 
PRIORY CHURCH — PEMBROKE DOCK — LAMPHEY 
AND THE EARL OF ESSEX 

'If you are a castle-lover you will tarry one long 
day at least at Pembroke, to make acquaintance 
there with its superb great fortress. The fair, 
rural, peaceful neighbourhood near about it helps 
to set it off. But it has, too, a change of wild and 
waterside scenery, sea and river — Milford Haven, 
Carew Castle, the Stack Rocks, Nangle, St. David's. 
Those who make any longer stay may be pleased 
even, though they are not antiquaries, at the idea 
of playing lawn tennis within the walls of an old 
castle, and crying " fifteen-love ! " where long ago 
the young squires shot at the mark. The last, best 
remembered fatal association of the walls, the 
siege of 1648, the death of Colonel Poyer, lend 
them only pensive memories now. 

If you arrive by train, you have to traverse the 
whole length of the town, and the apparently 
endless High Street, before you see the Castle. 
On the way you will take due note of the parish 
church of St. Mary, curiously built-in by the neigh- 
bouring houses at the corner of Dark Street and 
opposite the Lion Hotel. Notice the Chapel of 
St. Thomas on the west side of the building ; here 

276 



PEMBROKE CASTLE 277 

I believe, lies the body of a murdered knight who 
figured in romance. If you still persist, you leave 
two or three shops and a subterranean newspaper 
office on your right, and then spy at once the 
entrance to the Castle on the same side. 

The Castle is set on a strong natural site, a lime- 
stone rock, rising some fifty feet from the river, 
which, with its fork to the west, Monkton Pill, 
surrounds it with water at very high tides for 
two- thirds of its circuit. Five towers and five 
bastions surrounded and kept the outer court ; 
and behind the chief tower, or keep, the inner 
ward was placed at the corner, best protected by 
the river and river-cliffs from attack. Before the 
days of cannon and mortars the place must have 
been almost impregnable — by open assault at any 
rate. 

-On entering to-day by the gatehouse at the 
south-east corner, you have to keep directly oppo- 
site across the great outer court, over one hundred 
yards across. The gatehouse, defended by its two 
strong towers, was arranged to be partly inde- 
pendent of the keep and the cluster of domestic 
buildings about the keep. The oldest parts of the 
Castle abut on the keep, which is climbable. From 
the top you have a bird's-eye view of the whole 
surroundings, and if it be full tide you have a 
notable long stretch of water before you, far 
along the wide miles of Milford Haven, skirting 
the Pwllcrochan Flats, as well as the town pill or 
creek, and the Monkham pill close below. To the 
north Precelly Mountain and, a little left of it, 
Vrenny Vawr are to be seen when the air is clear. 
Towards Tenby you have a sea-vista opening 
between the high grounds and the two ridges 
formed by the Ridgeway on the left and the 



278 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 






Portclew hills on the right, and the range of 
coast where the latter runs out, from Swanslake 
to Caldy. Nearer at hand, behold across Monkton 
Priory the trees of Orielton and the Castleton 
ridge. 

The nose only of the castle-peninsula was first 
fortified, the gateway then being to the right of the 
keep as you look across the large outer court to the 
gatehouse. Now, having been as high as you can 
get on the tower-top, you can go down below to the 
Castle cavern, or Wogan — Welsh, " Ogov " (ogovan) 
— a cave. This is to be reached through the North 
Hall, whence a flight of steps and a dependent 
rope on the far side conduct you to it. The fine 
window in the wall was opened some years ago by 
Mr. Cobb. The water-gate, or sally-port, as he 
suggests, appears to have had no portcullis or other 
defences such as the imaginary castle-builder of 
to-day would expect to have found. To envisage 
the water-gate from without you must follow the 
path round the water-side. The "Wogan" measures 
some thirty-six paces long by twenty-eight wide. 
Possibly it was some kind of cave-dwelling first of 
all : then Briton and Roman used a part of the 
Castle rock for a fort ; the Welsh re-used it ; so 
did the Normans. As you explore you gradually 
unfold in Pembroke Castle the intermittent legend 
in stone of its broken history. 

We may note that the interior height of the 
keep is 75 feet, and that its hugeous walls ranged 
from 17 to 19 feet thick at its base, and from 
14 feet 6 inches to 12 feet 6 inches at the first 
and second floor levels. The top is domed. Its 
arrangements are all plain and contemptuous of 
all our ideas of comfort through its five stories. 
Its builder, says Mr. Cobb, "must have had ideas 



PEMBROKE CASTLE 279 

like those of the builders of the Great Pyramid." 
There is some Egyptian mystery about it, too, to 
the modern spectator. What did the people do 
in it? How did they contrive to live in it? 
Truly it is almost impossible to conceive that 
this tower was the seat of almost regal state. 
But there it stands — "the heart of Pembroke," 
as one has called it ; " the keeper of the King's 
haven," another ; and deserving certainly to 
count among the nine wonders of South Wales. 
You must not forget the Castle was but the 
main knot and warder of the Pembroke fortifi- 
cations. Leland wrote : " The towne is well 
waulled and hath iii gates, by est, west, and 
north, of the wich the est gate is fairest and 
strongest, having a faire but a compasid tour not 
rofed, in the entering whereof is a portcolys, ex 
solido ferro." Of these erections there are now 
but very imperfect remains ; the north gate alone 
is still in tolerable repair. 

" A slender fortress of stakes and turf " was the 
beginning of Pembroke Castle, according to Gerald 
the Welshman. This was erected by Arnulf de 
Montgomery in Henry I.'s reign. But before that 
Cadwgan of Bleddyn is said to have twice besieged 
a castle of Pembroke, which he twice failed to take. 
It seems, too, no very solid or convenient hold 
stood here in the early twelfth century, because 
Gerald de Windsor (grandfather of Gerald the 
Welshman) is said to have built a new Castle of 
Pembroke then, on a site called Congarth Vechan. 
Is it possible this site of the new Castle was the 
present site ? (" Congl-garth-fechan," what can 
one make of that?) Wherever this Castle was, it 
was the scene of one of the wildest exploits in 
Welsh history — the abduction of Nest by Owain 



280 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

(ap Cadwgan ap Bleddyn). Nest was the daughter 
of Rhys ap Tewdur, and considered the most 
beautiful wonian of Wales in her time. When she 
was still very young she had been married diplo- 
matically to Gerald de Windsor ; and it can be 
imagined what excitement this alliance between 
two famous Welsh and Norman houses caused in 
Wales. Nest's beauty was a theme for song, and 
when her kinsman Cadwgan gave a great feast 
at Cardigan, her fame was so extolled there that 
his son Owaiu, filled with wonder and excite- 
ment, decided upon a visit to Pembroke Castle 
to see her. Her beauty proved more than he 
could bear to see, and he formed then the wild 
idea of returning suddenly with a strong force, 
attacking the Castle, and carrying her off. 
Wild as the scheme was, it succeeded perfectly. 
Gerald, surprised, narrowly escaped with Nest's 
aid, while she and her children, and " much 
plunder," were carried off by Owain to his castle 
in Powys-land. 

But we must o'erstep the Middle Ages now, to the 
great siege of Pembroke town and castle, in Crom- 
well's time ; following his successful sieges of 
Chepstow and Tenby, the latter on the 31st of 
May, 1648. On the 6th of June following a letter 
of that date says Cromwell has subdued all Wales 
except Pembroke Castle, and that the townsfolk 
have " their horses and cows on the thatch of their 
houses." On the 14th Cromwell describes their 
firing houses in the town — "the fire runs up the 
hill and much frights them." Finally, after some 
desperate sallies, when Cromwell's side lost heavily, 
the water was cut off from the pipes (some of the 
pipes are in Tenby Museum), secretly laid to the 
Castle over the Mill Bridge, and provisions having 



PEMBROKE CASTLE 281 

given out, town and Castle were surrendered on 
July 11th. Poyer, the hero of this defence, who 
had fought previously for Cromwell, was the last 
to suffer for its stubborn maintenance. He and 
Laugharne and Powell were doomed : then the 
sentence was compromised, and only one was to 
die. Lots were drawn by a youngster : the fatal 
lot fell to Poyer, and he was shot in Covent Garden, 
in the Piazza, April 21, 1619. One of the saddest 
of family mottoes is that taken in consequence by 
the Poyer family : " Sors est contra me " — " Fate's 
against me." 

Like Carnarvon, Pembroke Castle is not quite 
sure in which of its towers a prince was born. 

Leland says : "In the atter ward I saw the 
chaumbre wher King Henry VII. was borne, in 
knowledge whereof a chymmeney is new made, 
with the arms and badges of Henry vii." 

An apartment in the keep is now pointed out 
usually as his, but it is conjectured that the 
southern towers are more likely to have been the 
King's quarters, as they show some signs of Tudor 
alterations and adornments. Henry II. and John 
were among the royal visitors here too. The 
builder of the later Edwardian outer castle, the 
North Hall, was probably Montchesny, who was 
castellan about 1300. 

On leaving the Castle you can go down Westgate 
Hill, and instead of crossing Monkton Bridge, walk 
right round the Castle under the walls, and emerg- 
ing on the quay, cross Mill Bridge, where, when 
the water is well up, the picture is luminous 
and delightful in contrast — floating masonry and 
painted water. If bound for Monkton Priory, you 
cross the Monkton Bridge at the foot of Westgate, 
and then turn to the right up the bank, when you 



282 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

see the Priory Church above you, whose great 
length is imposing. 

The unusual length of the church is balanced by 
the fine tower. It was designed for two congrega- 
tions, one of the Priory, the other of the parish. 
For long the former part, the choir, was in ruins, 
but is now restored. The tower-top is said to 
command a superb view of the town and Castle 
opposite and the country adjacent. The building 
has marked Norman structural points, but the 
windows and details are Early English. The 
Priory farm has little of the old prior's lodging 
left now. Sixty or seventy years ago, remains of 
the cloisters were to be seen. The cloisters, it is 
evident, must have added greatly to the architec- 
tectural effect of the whole. 

The Priory was originally attached to the House 
of Jayes in Normandy. The Prior's Hall, as it has 
sometimes been called, standing on the hill ap- 
proaching, has a long, low, vaulted chamber on the 
ground-floor, partly cut out of the solid rock — 
now used as a schoolroom — and other chambers 
above, one with a fine fireplace. A rough outer 
staircase, leading to the upper chambers, existed 
up to about thirty years ago. A little later the 
whole was restored by Mr. Cobb, of Brecon. 
There are traces of other old buildings in Monk- 
ton, which point to a priory suburb worthy of 
the castellated town over the water. 

Pembroke had a very fine reputation for pirates, 
or for its dealings with them, in Elizabethan days. 
Among them, the name of Edward Herberde, who 
was the great Sir John Perrot's man formerly, 
opens the longest and strangest episode. Herberde 
captured a ship with a salt cargo belonging to a 
Dutchman — Peter Muncke, and put some of his 



PEMBROKE CASTLE 283 

men aboard her. Next night a storm separated 
the two vessels, and Herberde's rascals took the 
prize into Milford Haven, and actually sent the 
unhappy Dutch skipper with two of the crew into 
the town to sell the salt. The town was Pembroke. 
The mayor, however, thought the affair suspicious ; 
Muncke's face spoke volumes ; and a word aside 
with him explained. The mayor made some pretext 
of offering the salt to Sir John Perrot at Carew, 
and repaired thither with the Dutch skipper and 
one of the Herberde gang. Sir John was delighted 
at the chance of booty and a legal swoop, and he 
and the Mayor and the Dutchman devised a night 
raid. Two boats put off in the dark, the first 
containing Muncke, a Captain Hinde in Sir John's 
service, and one Rice Thomas. Sir John and ten 
or twelve men followed in the second. Muncke 
called out as his boat drew near to his own sailors 
on board to seize the ship. A cry of "Sir John 
Perrot ! " followed. Three or four of the rascals 
escaped in a boat. The rest were captured and 
taken prisoner to Harfat. When the booty came 
to be divided Sir John got the lion's share, half the 
salt — five tons of it going to the Mayor. The ship 
and her tackle were divided between two Vaughans 
— John " the customer," and Richard, deputy of Sir 
William Morgan, Vice-Admiral of South Wales. 
Muncke had half the salt for his solace, but he 
disappeared before the trial of the pirates came on 
at Haverfordwest Assizes, and Judge Fetyplace set 
the rascals free. The end of Herberde was grim 
enough. He had brought in a captured cargo of 
Gascon wines, which Kift (fine name for a sea tale, 
Kift !) the local Admiralty man had seized and sold 
to Sir John at £7 a tun. Then Herberde was 
deserted by his own men, who no doubt counted 



281 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

him an unlucky leader. He went to lodge not far 
from Haroldston, where Sir John was residing at 
the time, and the knight's threats and oaths 
uttered against and about him so terrified him, that 
he cut his throat in his lodging. This was no man 
for a pirate's life, you may think ; but then Sir 
John's oaths were tremendous even for Elizabethan 
times. He owed it to his royal sire perhaps — but 
this is no page for scandal. 

Beyond old Pembroke lies the new Pembroke 
of the dockyards. One thinks of Lewis Morris — 
Lewis o Fon, and of his coast and harbour survey, 
as one explores the place, or standing at the 
ferry there, watches a marvellously nimble and 
infernal-looking electric-boat dash up to the land- 
ing, the water a-wash over her bows, drop an 
officer ashore, and go off again at reckless speed. 
One thinks of him because he, being a man of 
imagination and of large constructive ideas, who 
thought in lead-mines and sea-harbours, as well as 
in ryric measures and prose idioms, saw the oppor- 
tunities of the Welsh coast long before the official 
folk in London did. In 1742 we find his brother 
William speaking of him as the " hydrographer," 
and five years later he himself writes about the 
maps he is drawing. He was appointed Surveyor 
by the Admiralty in 1737, and in 1718 published 
his Plans of Harbours, Bars, Bays, and Roads in 
St. Georges Channel. 

\ One summer evening we were tempted to 
Lamphey Palace (pron. Lanffey) on our road 
Tenby-wards, being arrested by the aspect of 
Lamphey village, graciously framed by the trees 
of Lamphey Court. We found a back-way opposite 
the church, which served as a short-cut. and inter- 
cepted the wide sweep of the drive across the park. 



PEMBROKE CASTLE 285 

Not being sure of our right of entry, we felt rather 
like Welsh cattle-raiders as we skirted the old 
wall beyond, bordering the orchards and kitchen 
gardens, and then looked up to see the east 
window of the chapel staring at us out of an ivied 
visage across the green close. The Palace itself, 
as Gower left it in 1335 or so, may have consisted 
of the arcaded hall and an older chapel with 
irregular outlying buildings. All is not to be 
safely attributed to Bishop Gower, but certainly 
the arched parapet is his and the detached out- 
look tower. The chapel is due to another and 
later hand (some say Bishop Vaughan). It is a 
Perpendicular building ranged above a ruined 
cloister. The Lamphey stream that runs by the 
Palace becomes the Pembroke River. The original 
Welsh name, to quote Fenton, was Llanfydd — 
" the Welsh for Fanum Sanctce Fidei Virginia — 
dedicated to St. Faith." " The first instrument I 
have seen dated from this place is one of Bishop 
Richard de Carew, a.d. 1259 ; and from that time 
the occasional residence of almost all the bishops 
there in succession may be traced, particularly of 
Gower, Adam Hoton, and Vaughan." 

One or two larger apartments, reached by steps 
or a ladder from without, including the so-called 
Red Chamber and the reception Hall, show that 
the Palace was one of much state. 

The parish church of Lamphey village we did 
not visit. It has an old font and piscina worth 
seeing, they say. Here lived in his susceptible 
years — and it is a memory no place could forget — 
the great Earl of Essex, under the protection of 
his kinsman, Richard Devereux, in whose favour 
Henry VIII. had alienated the manor. He came 
of a gifted, comely, dangerous house. His story 



286 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

is in part that of Hamlet (for his mother's intrigue 
with Leicester, and his father's death, believed by 
many to be by poison, brought tragedy into his 
very childhood). But his early temper was gay ; 
his spirit valorous and ambitious ; and if he had 
a dash of poetry, he was not moody, save by 
moments. In his youth he had a rare and beauti- 
ful spirit, according to those who knew him : it is 
the finer image of young Robert Dudley that you 
see stamped on the green arras of Lamphey. Like 
Pryderi in the Welsh tale of this country-side, he 
was brought up as carefully as was fit, so that he 
became the fairest youth and the most comely, 
and the best skilled in all good games of any in 
the kingdom. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

THE BOSHERSTON ROAD — SIR GAWAIN AND ST. 
govan's CHAPEL — HUNTSMAN'S LEAP AND THE 
STACK ROCKS — ANGLE — A YOUNG SEAL 

It was a changeable, untrustable morning, the 
26th of September. The wind was veering east 
to south-east, and rain fell at Whitland, fell 
heavily. Then at Pembroke came a glimpse of 
watery sunshine. No one could have told how the 
afternoon would turn out when we left Pembroke 
about one. 

We dropped out of the town, crossing the line of 
the rusty old town-walls at its back, to the river, 
which reflected a sky watery as itself. Once over 
the bridge, we fell to debating the two roads to 
Bosherston : one shorter and rougher, one longer 
and smoother ? At that moment I spied a man with 
a drover's whip going in the same direction. He 
replied with a husky, eagerly friendly voice — and 
a new variety of the Pembrokeshire speech — to 
David's salute. 

Yes, he knew Bosherston well, and St. Govan's. 
Indeed, he knew " every sheep-thrack in the 
country, from Holyhead down to Chepstow ! " 

His face was Celtic; he spoke Welsh, though 
the most of the people in this shore did not ; 
he knew the country-side like a native. But 

287 



288 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

when David asked, " Beth yw'ch enw chi ynte ? " 
he answered, Michael O'Brien. 

He had led a roving life. First he served in the 
army ; then came three heart-breaking years on 
the sick-list, and he seemed done for altogether. 
At last he chanced to take a drover's place, and 
the open road and the fresh air gradually cured 
his army ailments and ague ; and now he had led 
the life long enough to have travelled all over 
Wales and Ireland, and well up into Scotland too. 
He wore a brick-red kerchief round his throat, 
which gave a touch of colour to his figure, other- 
wise all of a drover's dusty brown. He talked, 
delighting in his own voice, with an expressive 
rush of words, slightly aspirating his s's : — 

" Kilkenny's the shnuggest small town in the 
whole counthry. Stands well it does, and looks 
well. Not a big place : five or six thousand, that's 
about all. 'Tis a nice-lookin' little town, ah, 'tis 
that. A man could'n' wish for a nisher." 

He knew the difference between north and 
south-country Welsh ; but here there was no 
Welsh, and poor enough English. 

" I'm working for a sheep-farmer now ; an' he's 
a Welshman ; an' he can't speak a word of Welsh ; 
but I CAN ! " he said this ending with a triumphant 
crescendo. He told us what turns to take for the 
quicker of two roads to Bosherston, and we parted 
at the gate of a sheep-field. Two miles further on, 
and down came the rain again, with the wind 
going round in the south-west — rain that was spilt 
from a bucket, wetting one through in a few 
minutes. We sheltered from it under some ash- 
trees — and very poor shelter ash-trees make. In 
ten minutes it was over. 

The best prelude to the treeless tract of coast 



THE BOSHERSTON ROAD 289 

from St. Govan's to the Stack Rocks is to skirt the 
plantations of Stackpool Court. We sped fast, by 
the winding, skirting, slow-descending road, past a 
mile of woodland and parkland that begged for 
lazy days and a long acquaintance. The figure of 
Sir Gawain, a ghost in rusty armour, ought to 
start there : — 

"... On the morne merrily he rides 
Into a forest full deep, that was wondrous wild." 

But the fear of more rain and the thought of 
Gawain's or St. Govan's Chapel drew us on. At 
Bosherston the wind was terrific, and gave one 
a wildish idea of what was to come. However, 
there was a lull as we reached the cliffs, and the 
setting of the chapel, built across the sea-cwm so 
as effectually to close it up, was like nothing else 
we had seen on any coast and made us forget the 
gale. 

V The strangeness of the site, indeed, is such as to 
make one remember that the tribal chiefs who 
became hermits were given to fix their hibernating 
cells in places of utter isolation. The story of Sir 
Gawain needs humouring to be adapted to suit all 
the necessities of the case. The later romances 
say he was buried at Dover Castle, while William 
of Malmesbury says he lies at Rhoose in this shire ; 
and the geography of his life is equally puzzling. 
But then romance figures are a kind of composite 
portraits, and Gawain underwent more changes 
than most of them. His names, Gwalchmai, 
Walwayne, Gawain, Gowan, Govan, Galvanus, &c, 
suggest it. His literary pedigree is longer than 
Arthur's ; his character goes through wild trans- 
migrations ; he is fearless, chivalrous, devoted ; 

19 



290 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

cruel, treacherous, faithless. His decadence, it is 
significant to note, begins with his attachment to 
the story of the Sangraal. However, to connect 
him with St. Govan and place him in the saints' 
calendar, we have to recall that he touches St. 
David. At St. David's Cathedral there is a miseri- 
cord which shows a curious deep-bottomed ferry- 
boat, one of whose passengers is overtaken by sea- 
sickness. This hero, according to tradition, is St. 
Govan. The clue is enough to relate him to his 
chapel as a sea-hermit who went and suffered by 
sea. That afterwards his roving and predatory 
life and adventures were worked up in romance, 
while his sanctity was forgotten, is nothing. The 
making of the romantic lay-figure out of an old 
tribal chief is often a most erratic process, subject 
to the dullness of one redactor and the vagaries of 
another. 

A very impressive folk-tale, one which would 
have appealed to Tolstoi, is told of St. Govan's. 

Once a farmer was sowing barley in the down- 
land above the chapel when he saw a stranger of 
noble mien who stood by watching him. 

" That seed you are sowing will decay," he said at 
length. 

11 Yes," said the farmer, " it will rot, sure 
enough ; but it will spring again, and at harvest- 
time I will come and gather the ripe grain with 
my sickle." 

" Do you believe that which is dead can come to 
life and live again ? " 

" I do." 

" Then," said the stranger with an air of majesty, 
" I am the Resurrection and the Life. Go then, 
fetch thy sickle and cut thy corn." 

The farmer went. On his return the stranger 



THE BOSHERSTON ROAD 291 

had gone. But the barley which he had sown was 
ripe and ready for cutting that same day. 

The essential thing at St. Govan's is to believe 
in the Saint's reality ; a man torn by passions, who 
fasted and fought the flesh and the devil for a time 
in this strait cleft by the sea. The other alterna- 
tive is to turn vandal and tourist, and in contempt 
throw a stone into the desecrated holy well, where 
so many a poor creature came to kneel and pray 
and, with clay on the blind eyes or the hurt limb, 
hope for cure. 

A wilder sou'-westerly gale we could not have 
wished for, to lend expression to a wild coast, than 
that we met on reaching the cliff -top again ; we 
felt its full fury in crossing the head of each 
successive chasm, up which it blew with 
tremendous buffets that fairly made one stagger. 
And the sea, running in with immense ocean- 
waves at an angle, struck the rocky spurs with a 
force that sent white sheets up to the top of the 
cliffs and scattered foam like snow on our coat- 
sleeves. It was a delicious experience to lie down 
on the jutting brink of the cliff at some sharper 
edge and watch this foam and taste the salt spray, 
waiting for the terrific ninth wave that should 
out-top nature. That is a sensation you can get, 
no doubt, on other parts of this coast. But rifts 
like the Huntsman's Leap are quite outside one's 
ordinary experience. " They wait," says one 
traveller, "for their victim with a stealthy 
pretence of guileless grass and smooth turf. A 
narrow ditch you think you can jump opens at 
your feet : subterque cavis grave rupibus antrum, et 
vacuum — it is sixty fathom deep, and he that slips 
is lost." 

The story of Huntsman's Leap is that the 



292 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

hunter following the hounds made a short-cut, as 
he thought, in full career, and coining suddenly to 
the cleft leapt it safely. But his nerves could not 
stand that horrid glimpse of the earth's rent abyss 
and watery entrails, and he died from the sheer 
after-gust of the experience. The story is about 
as old as St. Govan's Chapel ; but in our time a 
young man deliberately attempted the leap, slipped 
his foot, and " came off" as the climbers say, with 
what result you may imagine. The dry, slippery 
turf in hot weather is far more treacherous than 
the actual stone edges that warn you away. 

Though there were fresh wheel-marks on the 
rough road westward from Huntsman's Leap, we 
did not see a soul all the way to the Stack Rocks. 
An old limekiln on the cliffs in one place, a 
ruined cottage or two a little inland, and some 
sheep in a seaward field — these were our only 
company. 

We were afraid we had passed the Stack Rocks, 
when approaching a coast-guard's look-out cabin 
we spied the gap where they stand. The sea- 
birds we had been told to expect there in clouds 
were not to be seen. Only one or two grey gulls 
were flying wild a short pitch away. The sea 
made up for all lack of bird-life. Had we not 
been so hungry we could have watched it for 
hours break and shatter itself on the rocks below, 
for there was something hypnotising in the coil 
and recoil of the breakers. 

Another mile after passing the Stack Rocks, 
you reach the tremendously built outpost of this 
limestone peninsula at Linney Head. After that 
the limestone gives out, and the Old Red Sand- 
stone puts in at Freshwater Bay. 
. We were too tired by our battle with the wind 



THE BOSHERSTON ROAD 293 

to go and look for the old forts near this corner. 
The last indignity it offered was to blow out 
David's matches when he tried to light a pipe. 
So, without waiting to see Brownslade or the 
Brimstone Rock, we gave up the struggle and 
turned our backs on it, with Castle Martin and a 
hoped-for Castle Inn for goal. We rode fast, 
the wind behind us, and presently beyond a wide 
dip saw an imposing church tower and spire ; " no 
doubt Castle Martin ! " It proved to be Warren : 
a farm-house and a few cottages were the only 
community, and there was no inn or shop to be 
seen. Another mile took us to Castle Martin. 
But again there was no inn ; and we were advised 
in our state of ravening hunger to apply at a 
cottage in a lane. Its mistress was taken by 
surprise, but a good toasting-fire provided toast 
and a teapot, while a village ancient sat by and 
told us there were no inns on the Stackpool estate, 
and the nearest was at Angle. 

" There," said he, " you can have your tay if 
ye like on the housetep : for 'tas a flat roof to it." 
\It was almost twilight when we took the road 
for Angle, and luckily the wind had dropped with 
the day. The road crossed a wildish stretch of 
high moorland, then dropped to the sea, where 
our wheels ran through soft sand. A climb 
brought us to high ground again for another 
short mile from which the descent was steep 
and tree-darkened, toward Angle and its bay. 
The lights were twinkling there in the cottage 
windows as we ran by three soldiers and reached 
the village. The inn was dark. A rather dubious 
lad came to the door, who did not hold out much 
hope of accommodation. The only parlour down- 
stairs was full of soldiers talking noisily about 



294 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

South Africa, so we made our way into a long, 
high-raftered kitchen, with a very hot outstanding 
stove in full blast. On the table were pots of 
newly-made blackberry -jam ; a small, pretty child, 
a girl of four, was playing with some toys ; a fine 
yellow collie called Nell came in, and threw herself 
down by the stove. 

The heat soon drove us out into the common- 
room, where a young fisherman sat drinking a 
pint of ale. We fell into talk about the fishing, 
the forts, the soldiers, and so forth. Presently, 
for want of something better to say, I asked if 
they ever came on seals in these waters ? 

His reply surprised me : " Ye can see one now 
at Mr. Boothes' ! " 

It appeared that a young seal had been caught 
and killed on the rocks near the bay that after- 
noon by Tom Boothes. Later in the evening a 
youngster volunteered to guide me to his house 
at the upper end of the village. 

The boy took me under the stars to a dark 
door of an apparently darker house. A girl, as she 
seemed, slight, black-haired, pretty, came to the 
door, and asked us in. 

The dead seal lay in a back-kitchen — a small 
pool of red blood on the flags at his grey, kitten- 
like head. He was very light grey in colour, with 
pale buff bands or patches relieving the body- 
colour, and he was surprisingly fat. The scene 
with the young mistress of the house standing 
there, naked candle in hand, and throwing the 
light on the poor little beast, was not one for 
a mere scribe to describe. We were still examin- 
ing it, when its captor returned. He did not 
know how to skin it, or whether to sell it, or 
what to do with it. His wife was more practical. 



THE BOSHERSTON ROAD 295 

She had often skinned birds and rabbits. " If 
you could skin a rabbit, you could skin a seal," 
she said. 

There was another pause, for Boothes had throe 
confederates who must be consulted. 

The conference took place in the dark road 
under the stars, and the result was the four men 
undertook to skin the seal and bring the skin 
to the inn that night. They discussed the opera- 
tion with extraordinary gravity, as one that might 
easily be rendered fatal. 

" See here," said the smallest of the four, whose 
face I could not discern, "you have to keep all 
his fat on, else the skin 'ull speal ; and some 'ill 
keep his fins, and some wint. 'Tis a ticklish 
thing ; ye ought to allow for that, mister ! " 

Finally, the price agreed, I went back to the 
inn, and being tired out, waited a while and so 
to bed. Towards midnight the seal-captors 
arrived with the skin, and next morning we 
dressed it inside with rough salt, and packed it 
up. It weighed over thirteen pounds, fat and 
all, and the Post Office refused it as overweight. 
So Mercury and I had perforce to carry it all 
the way to Pembroke in a cardboard box, which 
caused many people to stare at us mildly en route. 

Mr. Whiting, of Hampstead, to whom the skin 
was sent to be cured, was not very hopeful about 
it. September was the wrong season, and this 
was the wrong kind of seal. However, his skill 
saved it. But I do not encourage others to take 
Welsh seals : they are too human in their spirit. 

George Owen, in his Description of Pembroke- 
shire, gives a curious account of seals and their 
fur in his chapter on " the severall sorte of fishe 
taken in this shire." 



296 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

The seal is "broad-pawed" he says, "like to the moale," 
and it "cometh to land to rest and sleep and lie together 
in herds like swine one upon another ; and at byrth time, as 
Plynie saieth cometh a land and is delivered and giveth 
sucke to the yonge, till he able to swymme w ch he saieth 
wilbe in xij daies. . . . The fawne at the first is white, and 
is more delicate meate than his Ancestor being strong and 
fullsome to eate. Yet is yt accompted a dayntye and a 
rare dishe of manie men. This fishe is verie fatte, as Bacon, 
and the skynne serveth to manie uses being dressed, especi- 
allie in tymes past for covering of tentes, because yt re- 
ceiveth no hurt by lightninges as saieth Plynie, li, 2 cap. 55. 
And saieth Rondele — this li. 46, cap. 6, the here of the 
seale stareth at the south windes, and goeth smooth w th 
the North ; but certaine yt is yt doeth so at the fflood and 
ebbe, staring with the one and smoothing with the other." 

To stare is to become stiff and stark. With 
the seal George Owen ranks the " Porpisse " and 
the " Thornepole," or the porpoise and grampus. 
All three, he says, " being ravenouse by nature 
followe the sculls [shoals] of heringes feeding 
on them, and are often taken wrapped in the 
herring-nets." 

The only other seal I have come across in South 
Wales was off Dinas Island, North Pembrokeshire. 
But that episode belongs to another page. 

The Welsh for a seal is " moelrhon " — bald-tail, 
shortened into " molrho." Gwilym Dyved speaks 
of the creature in one of his odes : — 

"Bald-head, bald-tail, — see him rise! 
Ware him : he hath woman's eyes ; 
Ware him, where he lies asleep. 
Years before he knew the deep, 
Three salt tears his change began 
When he changed from mortal man." 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

MILFORD AND MILFORD HAVEN — GEORGE OWEN OF 
HENLLYS — DALE —BRUNT FARM — M ARLOES — 
SKOMAR ISLAND 

Counting on American liners or revived dock- 
yards, Milford in its time has suffered many 
disappointments. Finally, having seen its last 
whaler go to Dundee or otherwhere, it has 
settled down to a pretty secure trawling business, 
and owns a fair fleet of steam trawlers, which 
transfer their fish to the Great Western Railway 
at its terminus here. So Milford mackerel, I 
suppose, may yet become as much a proverb as 
Yarmouth bloaters. The Haven's vast natural 
advantages, and its chances of yet negotiating a 
new great Transatlantic line, give the town, the 
Haven, and whole neighbourhood a potential 
air. 

The town station is set back in the cwm or 
valley of Priory Pill, rather inconveniently placed 
for the town, which spreads its streets mathemati- 
cally on the rising ground above. If you want 
a bird's-eye view the small hill of Hubberston, 
about a mile west, to be gained via Dock Street 
and the Quay, commands at a glance the town, 
the Haven, and its surroundings. 

Milford Haven was for long the one proverbial 

297 



298 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

great harbour of British tradition. Kings em- 
barked there for Ireland ; Shakespeare often chose 
it as the scene of the coming and going of his 
characters, such as " Cymbeline." People can be 
found, indeed, who believe Shakespeare himself 
visited Milford. As for Nelson, there is no doubt 
at all about his visit after the Battle of the Nile, 
when he was hero of the seas. Milford the port 
began its career through the direct agency of 
Lady Hamilton's husband — Sir William — and his 
nephew, Charles Greville, who succeeded to the 
property. The new hotel built in Nelson's honour, 
"The Lord Nelson," no longer looks new. Sir 
William Hamilton lies buried in the church which 
Greville built, — and it contains a red porphyry 
vase inscribed to Nelson's memory. 

The Haven can be best explored by boat from 
Milford Quay. Seizing the tide, it is possible to 
sail down to the mouth of the harbour, get a 
glimpse of both the Block Houses, and return 
in an afternoon. The water excursions beyond 
Neyland and Pembroke in the Cleddau estuaries 
and pills are endless. 

George Owen, of Henllys, gives in his Pembrokeshire 
records a most quotable account of Milford Haven in 1595. 
" And for forme," he said, "the havon may well be likened 
to the picture of some greate crooke and forked Tree having 
many branches and bunches some greate some litle growe- 
inge even up from the butt to the Toppe ; and the same 
branches being lopped and cut off, some neere and some 
farre from the bodye of the Tree (from the crookednes downe) 
the picture of such tree might soe be drawne as the same 
should well describe the true forme of this harborowe and 
every branch and creeke thereof." Modern maps do not 
show the "forked Tree" so well as the map George Owen 
made of the Haven ; but if the map of Pembrokeshire is 
turned so that the east forms the top of it, instead of the 







a x 

< f- 

* c 

O > 



MILFORD AND MILFORD HAVEN 299 

north, the resemblance is clear enough. George Owen was 
anxious to have the harbour fully fortified. The Block 
Houses at Dale and Nangle were prompted by a similar fear 
of invasion. Some of his names, such as Prix Pill, for Castle 
Pill, and the Carne, for the Carrs, have been altered since 
his day. The "Haking," which is the Milford Pill in especial, 
is by him called the Priory Pill. He describes it as "a creeke 
that turneth uppe on the Easte parte of Hubberston pointe 
and reacheth up farre into the land untill the Priory house 
being a myle in the land, yt it is all owse " (ooze, or mud), 
"and therefore no good landing there. This pill is dry at 
lowe water." 



On the bluff point of St. Ann's Head, two miles 
south of Dale village, are two lighthouses. 
\ Brunt Farm, on the coast, just within the corner 
of Mill Bay, preserves the tradition that there, 
where a steep path descends to the foot of Brunt 
cliff, Henry VII. landed, as Earl of Richmond, not 
knowing what fate had in store for him. Finding 
the climb up the craggy cliff a heavy one, " this," 
said he, " is brunt ! " At the top of the cliff stood 
a wise-woman of Dale, who, after a glance at 
him, vowed that fortune and a kingdom would be 
his. 

From West Dale Bay, by Marloes Bay, crossing 
thence the Woolpack mile-wide peninsula, and so to 
Marloes, offers a coast adventure worth the trouble. 
Quarters may be had at Marloes, if one is not too 
exacting. The cliffs above Marloes sands are such 
as to call out the new stone-men's raptures ; and 
the beach is noted for its fine cowrie-shells. The 
men of Marloes used to be nicknamed "Marloes 
gulls " ; and they appear to have used this charac- 
ter of theirs as a cloak for sharper qualities ; for 
they were, in the old time, the most notorious 
wreckers on this coast. 



300 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

From Marloes, or to be exact, from Martin's 
Haven, it is a short but sometimes very nasty 
crossing to Skomar Island. The following notes 
of a naturalist (the writer's uncle, Mr. Percy 
Percival, of Berrow Manor) well describe the wild 
colony of birds there: — 

"A vast number of sea-birds breed on Skornar Island, the 
most peculiar of them all being the Manx Shearwater. These 
queer creatures confine themselves to the rabbit-holes during 
the day, and only come out in the dark, when they fly about 
close overhead, making a noise about which there is some- 
thing truly uncanny. The young are reared in those holes, 
and they seem to be full of oil which is most offensive. I 
had one in my pocket and unfortunately went to sleep and 
crushed the poor downy little thing ; as a consequence the 
coat was months before it was reasonably free from the oily 
smell. 

"The Stormy Petrels nest and bring up their young 
in the stone walls which take the place of hedges on the 
Island. It amused me to see the boys looking, or rather 
smelling, for eggs, for as a matter of fact they find them by 
scent — walking along close to the wall, sniffing at the holes — 
then stopping and going back a few paces, twisting their 
heads about to get the scent like an old hound — finally they 
locate the hole, and pulling out a few stones soon get out the 
eggs, which are white and have a strong unpleasant scent, 
which they retain for a long time after being placed in the 
egg cabinet. 

"The common Guillemots are in thousands, while the 
ringed variety are often met with. How these birds hatch 
their eggs and raise their young on a narrow shelf of rock, 
scarcely wide enough for foothold, is a mystery ; luckily they 
are of a friendly disposition, for the least quarrelling between 
the birds would send the eggs into the sea, hundreds of feet 
below, so close are the eggs together ; no doubt the peculiar 
shape of the eggs, i.e., very narrow at one end and broad at 
the other, prevents them rolling off the shelf. 

" Puffins, too, are very numerous, and look like long rows 
of white-breasted, black-backed soldiers, as they range them- 



MILFORD AND MILFORD HAVEN 301 

selves, quaint and motionless, along the edges of the cliff. 
They breed in rabbits' holes, or scoop out holes for them- 
selves if the soil is soft ; when bringing in food for their 
young, small sprats or other like fish, they arrange the fish 
so that the heads are in the bird's mouth and the bodies and 
tails hang out on either side, and look as if they had a 
brilliant silver beard ; when bringing in food they usually 
stand for a short time beside their holes, then walk quaintly 
in to give the meal. These birds are only too easily caught 
in the breeding season, and many of them, sad to relate, are 
used for bait in the lobster-pots. The Oyster-Catcher, or 
Sea-Pie, breeds on the Island, and at least one pair of 
Peregrine Falcons manages to raise a nest of young, though 
the egg-collector too often manages to find them. Rabbits 
are the most certain market-product of the Island. Stoats 
and weasels are not seen, though they with the polecat are 
met with on the nearest mainland. 

"Getting to the Island is best managed from Martin's 
Haven. It should only be attempted with experienced boat- 
men, as Jack's Sound, with its swift current, runs 'twixt the 
Island and Pembrokeshire — a pretty dangerous obstacle to 
negotiate. 

" There is a mouse, I may add, peculiar to Skomar, 
differing in some slight manner from the ordinary English 
mouse." 






CHAPTER XXIX 

SOLVA — ST. DAVID'S — CITY AND CATHEDRAL — NON 
AND HER CHAPEL — THE HEAD AND CARN LLIDI 
— THE STORY OF BOIA 

The old approach to St. David's was always via 
Haverfordwest, whence you had the proverbial 
heart-breaking road to traverse — " sixteen miles 
and seventeen hills." Still there were alleviations 
by the way. There was Roche Castle, six miles 
out from " Harfat," as the country people call 
what was once their chief country town. This 
Castle since I last passed that road has been put 
in repair. The present Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer was its tenant with his family for a brief 
holiday one autumn, when he asked the present 
vagrom Chronicler of the Principality, who was 
fast-tied in town, to visit him there — one of those 
lost opportunities that never return. Roche Castle, 
I have little doubt, will be the scene in days to 
come of a new George-and-Dragon myth, of 
which Welsh folk-lore is rather in need as the 
case stands. The Castle was built in the second 
rally of the Normans in South Wales by Adam 
de Rupe. 

Half a league further on, and you drop down 
upon the shore by a steep descent at Newgale 
Bridge. This is the boundary between Little- 

302 



SOLVA AND ST. DAVID'S 303 

England- beyond- Wales and theLit tie- Wales beyond 
that again. On one side of the bridge the Anglo- 
Flemish stock prevails, and English is spoken ; 
on the other, the country is Welsh in speech 
and thought. The inn at Newgale Bridge has 
always seenied to me one of those places ordained 
for romance in the Stevensonian sense. It may be 
compared by the Sentimental Traveller with that 
at Leith Ferry or, if he have ever been to Seaton 
Sluice on the Northumberland coast, with the " Blue 
Anchor " there. " Once," writes that same Tra- 
veller, " returning from Solva, I intended to take 
the mail-gig back from Newgale Bridge, after 
exploring the stretch of coast where St. Elvis 
and Pointz Castle stand. On the way a tempting 
sandy cove at the foot of a green cwm led me to 
descend, and idly loitering there I noticed presently 
that the tide was advancing and cutting off the 
next rocky corner at a wild Pembrokeshire pace. 
Thereupon I turned back to the other horn of 
the bay, but before I could reach it the waves 
were breaking over the ridges. The only way of 
escape left was up the cliff, which did not look 
too formidable. Unluckily at a third of the way 
up a patch of loose shaly stone made the foot- 
hold worse than undependable. A few feet higher, 
were it not for the thick oak stick I carried and 
used now at need, driving it two feet into 
the crumbing shale, I should have come 
off. At this moment the waves were dash- 
ing with great spirit five fathoms below, so 
that the climber, looking down, saw them dash up 
and recoil and come on again, like wild beasts in 
pursuit. That was their moment — their chance 
to shake a mortal's faith in the cliff and in him- 
self and his oak-peg. I am afraid the mortal 



304 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 



part of him felt queer ; but there is at times 
small providence in a precipice. A herb grew in 
a niche of loose stone, right under his very nose, 
as he hung there between sea and sky, and it 
had a faint, sweet, aromatic smell like a well-kept 
crab-apple. It was wonderful how that herb 
revived his courage. . . . 

"Half an hour, then, of grim, determined oak- 
pegging and footstep-holing, and the top of the 
cliff was reached ; and the climber threw himself 
breathless on the nearest green slope. When at 
last he rose up, and went to a knoll near by, 
whence he could look down to Newgale Bridge, 
it was to see the mail-gig already leaving the inn 
for the opposite ascent. There was nothing for it 
but to tramp the ten or eleven miles on to Har- 
ford. The only serious wound sustained in the 
battle with the cliff was an unexplainable huge 
rent in the back of his coat, which made decent 
folk regard him suspiciously in the gaslit street of 
Ha'rford when he got there after dark." 

From Newgale Bridge to Solva it is about five 
miles, or perhaps rather less. The long creek or 
harbour there makes an effect at once wild and 
homely as you descend into the place. 
v Nothing like Solva, says Gr. R., is to be seen 
elsewhere. Like a snow-white village maiden she 
perches on her cliffs. The Evil One must get little 
to do in Solva ; the very chimneys, his favourite way 
of descent, are barred to him : are not they and the 
houseroofs painted as white as snow ? Even the gate- 
posts, ay, and the gate-posts to the fields, are washed 
with white, that nothing evil may go out or in. 
On a clear blue day I have seen Solva dazzle in the 
sun's face, as she cast back the moving blue lights 
of the sea below. For the sea is unthinkably blue 



. 



SOLVA AND ST. DAVID'S 305 

at Solva on a clear day. The slate cliffs are blue 
and purple and green, the water clean and deep, 
like a fluid, many-coloured jewel ; the air has 
something of a like quality, so clear and clean it is 
and full of aromatic fragrances. A leaf follows 
from an old traveller's MS. book, whose exact age 
it would be hard to decide : — 

4 ' Delighted with this strange wild place, we decided to 
pass the night here rather than at St. David's. "We found 
excellent entertainment, and in the morning one of lis 
went visiting among the village folk of Upper and Lower 
Solva. She told us afterwards she found a strange comming- 
ling of types there — what wonder ? The harbour of Solva 
saw the Romans pass ; and by the sea-way came rovers, 
Danish, and Irish ; ay, many ships of many lands. I am 
assured too that the saintly community that ruled on this 
promontory left its spiritual progeny behind, notably in the 
person of one woman in whose history our companion became 
much interested. She was a tall, pale, gentle person, childless 
and somewhat sad. Her husband's trade (that necessary one 
that sacrifices our good friends the animals to our absurd 
needs) was her cross. He himself was an excellent kind man; 
she spoke of him with aifection ; but of his trade with shud- 
dering ; and yet she helped him in it. Her house was clean 
and plain, kept like a nun's cell, only better scrubbed. She 
had something of the temper of a Buddhist philosopher and 
talked of God, of the few books she possessed and treasured ; 
of music, which she might scarcely ever hear ; looking the 
while with a sort of patient wonder at the land-road and the 
sea-road that led to the great world ; for out of Solva she 
might never come. In bearing, manner and mind this woman 
would have made a perfect Abbess of a convent : still she had 
her uses in Solva, if only to teach that one may get to the 
last peak of the world and find a saint established there. 

Three and a half miles of unexciting road lead on 
to St. David's. The sea-coast and its splendid cliffs 
are out of sight ; the landscape is barren. But in 

20 



306 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

its very austerity there hides a satisfaction, and in 
these days when quiet shrines are few the remote- 
ness lends a charm. 

The traveller who goes to St. David's with 
memories of Durham and Lincoln, and of towers 
set high, may be disappointed on arriving there in 
the quiet street to see no sign of a Cathedral. To 
find it, it is necessary to dive into the quiet little 
vale of Alun, where the Cathedral stands. There it 
was built, hidden, like many other Welsh churches 
and religious houses, from the world because of 
the fierce eyes of sea-rovers and " pyrats." 

The more usual approach to the Cathedral is 
a hundred yards further on, by the lane known as 
the " Popples," a cobble-paved way which runs 
down to the Tower gateway, beyond which a broad 
range of steps and again a leisurely slant pathway 
leads to the door. 

The steps descending into the Cathedral yard 
are called by the St. David's folk who tread them 
oftenest the " Thirty-nine Articles " — being of that 
orthodox number. 

The first effect of the Cathedral, as one draws 
near to it, is apt to be for various reasons dis- 
appointing. The softness of age and the charm of 
old masonry are wanting, of course, to Sir Gilbert 
Scott's machine-cut blue facing blocks, which do 
not harmonise with the ancient parts of the 
building and its hand-chiselled, time-worn stone. 
One must pass round and on beyond the western 
doors of the Cathedral, and look across the little 
Alun stream, to the ruins of the Bishop's Palace, 
and along the north side of the Cathedral, past the 
ruined cloisters, and up the Vale of Roses, where 
the trees of the old Treasury Garden suggest a 
green pleasaunce for quiet walks, before one falls 



SOLVA AND ST. DAVID'S 307 

under the spell of the place. Within, the church 
vista seen from the west end has massive and noble 
lines ; and the time-faded colours of the pillars and 
the ceiling of Irish oak, and the form of the whole, 
make a lovely and harmonious interior. 

The nave and north and south aisles have just 
enough of ornament ; and the gradual rise in the 
floor up to the steps approaching to the choir 
takes the eye like the rise to a beech-grove from a 
forest lawn. At the top of the central steps, nearly 
on a line with the fifth pair of pillars, we have two 
tombs of clerics — probably Bishop Carew(1256-1280) 
and Bishop Beck (1280-1293), and between them the 
grave of some person unknown. Bishop Carew 
built a shrine for the relics of St. David, which may 
be that in the Presbytery. Bishop Beck had a mint 
at St. David's, and coined pennies, so rare now that 
a pretty penny would be asked for one of them. 
Also, he founded colleges at Llangadock and 
Llanddewi Brefi, and a hospital at Llawhaden. A 
penny of Edward I., a bishop's gold ring, a chalice, 
a paten, and a bishop's staff were found in his 
grave — if, indeed, it be his. We have already 
passed the much mutilated tomb of Bishop Morgan 
(1196-1501), just below the pillar nearest to the 
" Carew " tomb. The panel at the upper end repre- 
sents the Resurrection, with soldiery, the work of 
no common sculptor. A step or two to the right 
from Carew's tomb, and we come to the tomb of 
Bishop Gower — bishop here for twenty years 
(1328-1347), the finest ecclesiastical builder Wales 
ever had. His grave is placed within reach of 
the rood screen, which he built; and in his day an 
altar stood before the screen, to serve the nave and 
the public worshippers there. The monks had 
their separate service at the altar. And now, 



308 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 






having reached the choir, we can afford a pause 
to examine the stalls and seat carvings, which date 
from the fifteenth century. They are boldly and 
joyously irreverent in character, and make open 
fun, it must seem, of the churchmen who were to 
occupy them. One shows us a fox in a monk's 
hood handing a wafer to a goose with the head of 
a lay penitent. Another is a boatload of men 
rowing St. Govan, who is evidently troubled by 
sea-sickness. All these carvings are excellent and 
highly secular. It is impossible to avoid admiring 
the fine discrimination that adorned the part of the 
Cathedral intended for the laity with pious works 
of art, and lightened the strain of an incessant 
piety for the poor monks by such cynic-comic 
devices. 

Nowhere can the charm of St. David's be felt 
so fully as among the ruins of the Bishop's Palace, 
the work of that great architect, Bishop Gower. 
The old walls stand up, shaggy with ivy ; the open 
arcading at the top runs its fine design boldly 
along the sky. Its noble proportions speak to 
the mind and recall an ample past. It is interest- 
ing to remember that one bishop built the palace 
and another bishop tried to pull it down. 

Many royal princes have joined the stream that 
has flowed to St. David's, whose shrine, by its 
remoteness, the mystery of its sea-coast, and the 
difficulties of the journey in a day when wheels 
did not exist, gained all the enchantment that 
distance could lend. William the Conqueror, 
Henry II., Edward II., and Queen Eleanor are 
among the famous travellers who journeyed 
here. According to the old poets and chroniclers 
two visits to St. David's counted as one to 
Rome. 






SOLVA AND ST. DAVID'S 309 

"Roma semel quantum." 
Dat bis Menevia tan turn." 

No place suffered more from the iconoclasts 
than St. David's. The first great criminal was 
William Barlow, who sat as bishop from 1536 
to 1547. He must have been a good man of 
business, for, in that space of time, he contrived 
to pull the lead roofing off the Bishop's Palace, 
which he sold for his own profit — more remark- 
able still, he contrived to marry his five daughters 
to five bishops ! 

His successor, Bishop Ferrer, the unluckiest 
bishop that could be imagined, was not altogether 
guiltless of spoliation either ; but that he was 
imprisoned from political motives can be easily 
gathered from reading the charges against him, 
which include "wearing a hat, christening his 
child Samuel, whistling to the said child, whistling 
to a seal in Milford Haven, and riding with a 
bridle with white studs and snaffle, white Scottish 
stirrups, white spurs, a Scottish pad, with a little 
staff three quarters long." Ferrer, after being 
set free from prison, was imprisoned again and 
finally burnt in Carmarthen in 1555. 

And what shall be said of the persecutors of 
poor Elis ap Howel, the antiquarian sexton? 
\ " Because he being Sextene in the Oath' 
church of St. David's, of long time did conceal 
certain ungodly popish books ; as masse books, 
hympnalls, grailes, Antiphon's, and suche like, (as 
it were loking for a day) Mr. Chantor deprived 
hym of the sextenship and the fees belonging 
thereunto, and caused the said ungodly books 
to be canceld and torne in pieces in the vestrie 
before his face." These " ungodly books " were 



310 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

probably most beautiful and valuable specimens 
of the art of the time in illumination and gilding. 

For St. David's sake, the first adventure outside 
the city's boundaries ought to be to Non's Well 
and Chapel, and the coast near by. This is within 
an easy walk of the cross. A stretch of road 
and a couple of field-side paths bring one into 
the seaward field where stands the chapel, which 
is little more than a rude pile of stones within 
the four walls of the little building. The well 
lies fifty yards to the left, in an enclosed space, 
over whose wall one must make shift to climb 
carefully, so as not to do any damage. The well- 
water is clear and sweet, and the present pilgrim 
can honestly vouch that he felt invigorated and 
reanimated after drinking it. It was — indeed, still 
is — in much repute as a pin-well and wish-well. 
A penny deposited there, in the little niche in the 
stone at the left side, is said to disappear mysteri- 
ously : proof enough, if one were needed, that 
there is something of enchantment about the spot. 

The story of St. Non breathes an old-world air, 
to which the rude remains of the chapel and the 
lonely well lend a grey reality. Sandde, a chief 
of Cardigan, was bold and Non was beautiful, 
and he dispensed with the rites of the Church and 
the bride's consent ; and so, as a result of a 
marriage by capture, in a barbaric age and a 
wild place — it is said during a storm and on the 
cliff below the chapel — the babe, David, was born 
in the year 558. One imagines that he was 
sheltered then in a hut where the chapel now 
stands. Certainly both he and his mother must 
have often drunk from the well. 

But it was not there he was baptized, but at 
the old St. David's Well above the Cathedral. 



SOLVA AND ST. DAVID'S 311 

On leaving the chapel field, you cross a style 
and gain an overhanging cliff-path that follows 
the windings of the cliffs. On the rocks below 
the incoming tide returns upon itself in magni- 
ficent ocean waves rolled on a great axis. The 
nearest creek below the chapel has a rocky out- 
post, called the Chanter's Seat, where you sit 
at peril. Beyond this comes Porth y Ffynnon, 
and then again Porth Clais, where the Alun has 
its aber or outflow. Limekilns and an old landing- 
place lend the primitive port a show of occupation. 
From the crossing of the head of Porth Clais, 
it cost us a good half -hour's ramble round the 
cliff to Porth Lisky ; but these adventures can be 
continued endlessly here, with many ups and 
downs. A fair view of the Isle of Ramsey is to 
be gained from above Porth Taflod. It is usual 
to make the crossing to the island from Porth 
Clais. 

The noblest fastness of all this peninsula is St. 
David's Head, which is a little over two miles 
from the Cathedral. The by-road that crosses 
the Alun and runs up the bank above the Bishop's 
Palace is the most direct. But the main road 
up the Vale may be taken to the next bold turn 
to the left, and so to the ugly Vicarage posted 
high above the bridge, which carries one round 
by Pen Arthur Farm to join the wilder roadway 
beyond. The latter bears the curious name of 
"Fordd Chwech-Erw," or the Road of the Six 
Acres. The road reaches the shore at the north- 
ern end of Whitesand Bay, close to the old site 
of St. Patrick's Chapel, which is some twenty 
paces above the road. On the other side of the 
road, where a ruined boathouse shows some old 
walls, began the ancient enclosure of Menapia — 



312 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 






the oldest settlement — obviously too near the sea 
and too tempting to sea-pirates to remain long 
in that situation. The Vale of Alun, the histori- 
cal or legendary " Vale of Roses," would easily 
recommend itself at such time, as the first site 
proved disastrous. 

We have to ascend a considerable bank now 
on the way to the Head, skirting two more creeks 
or porths — Porth Llenog and Porth Melgaw. All 
along this open sea rampart we are on ground 
that once and in the unpopulous days of the cave- 
men and the cliff -men was one of the most popu- 
lous parts of early prehistoric Britain. How did 
they live? one asks as one gazes on the unfer- 
tile promontory. Not on plants and herbs, but 
on fish and the wild creatures to be caught in 
the sea and on its confines. 

N Mr. Edward Laws, author of Little England 
Beyond Wales, and the Rev. S. Baring- Gould, 
author of Pabo the Priest, &c, made considerable 
excavations on and a little north of the Head, 
which proved clearly that an extensive range 
of earth cells and dwellings existed here. 

Even on calm days the Atlantic pressure on 
the rocks here is formidable. In a storm from the 
south-west the breakers are terrible and magnifi- 
cent. One breaker, on a fine August afternoon 
in 1901, was the cause of the sad death of Reginald 
Smith (son of Chancellor Smith, the Rector of 
Swansea), who, stepping aside to avoid the spray, 
fell into Porth Melgaw, and after swimming 
vainly up the creek again and again, only to 
be washed back by the recoiling waves, was 
carried under. A stone now marks the spot 
where he slipped. 

From the " Head " it is well worth while to climb 



SOLVA AND ST. DAVID'S 313 

Cam Llidi, 595 feet above the sea-level. It 
suggests that a race of giants preceded the 
pigmies, or hut-dwellers, below, and hurled these 
mighty masses into " something like a cairn ! " 

From the top one can look down on Clegyr 
Foia, that hill whose name calls to mind the 
kind of life men led here fourteen hundred years 
ago. Clegyr Foia means Crag Boia ; and Boia 
was an Irish plunderer and chieftain of the sixth 
century who sojourned there. His story, as told 
by Mr. Baring-Gould, recalls the old fierce ballads 
of the North with the cruel step-mother as pro- 
tagonist. 

Boia had fixed his camp on the rock that bears 
his name, 320 feet long by 100 broad as you step 
it out to-day, and with him were his terrible wife 
and his step-daughter, the little maiden Dunawd. 
One morning he climbs to the top of his rock 
and looks below ; the smoke of a strange fire is 
going up from the slope of Cam Llidi, and he 
hurries off at once to discover not a rival robber, 
but a hermit cooking his meal beside his fire — 
David himself. Boia found him a wise and peace- 
ful soul who discoursed on the new doctrines ; 
Boia's heart was softened and he allowed the 
hermit to remain. Not so Boia's fierce wife : St. 
David could make no impression on her pagan 
spirit, and she resorted to every possible method 
to drive him away. Finding all fail, she deter- 
mined to invoke the aid of her gods, and to 
propitiate them by offering a human sacrifice. 

One warm day in early autumn she asked her 
step-daughter Dunawd to come with her into the 
hazel-wood to gather nuts, and then said she 
would dress Dunawd's tangled curls. But when 
the little maid laid down her head in her lap 



314 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

she first shore off her locks (an act by which 
she adopted the child as her own), and then cut 
her throat. Where the blood of Dunawd fell 
a pure spring burst up from the ground, which 
is called Ffynnon Dunawd (Dunawd's Fountain) 
to this day. 

But the vengeance of Heaven was waking 
against the camp of Boia and its inhabitants. 
We can imagine the dark headland sleeping 
under the September moon, and judgment in the 
shape of the " shiplette " of Paucant, the son of 
Liski, slipping with the tide into the bay below. 
(If you disbelieve the story you can go to-morrow 
to Porth Liski (Liski's harbour) and see where 
he landed and climb all the way he went to Boia's 
Crag.) This son of Liski was an Irish rover, too, 
and his men behind him carried slings and stones 
in their hands as David did in Palestine one still 
remoter day. One can imagine the shout with 
which they sprang on the fifteen-feet wall that 
surrounded the camp ; the hail of sling-stones 
swept over the west wall and fell on the further 
side — where you may pick up one or two still. 
Boia and his men were massacred, one and all. 

The wretched wife of Boia was slain or lost the 
same night, and the crag knew them no more. 

vBut David flourished and his doctrines spread, 
and he built a monastery and dwelt on that wild 
promontory till the time came for him too to 
depart. The words of the chronicler describing 
his death are much too moving not to be repeated 
in full : — 

\ " And on Tuesday night, about the time of 
cockcrowing, lo a host of angels filled the city, 
it was full of all kinds of songs and mirth ; and 
when the morning came the sun was shining on 



SOLVA AND ST. DAVID'S 315 

all the hosts. And on that Tuesday, the first of 
March, the Lord Jesus took the soul of St. David, 
with great victory and joy, and honour; after 
hunger, and thirst, and cold, and labour, and 
fasting, and granting charitable relief, and afflic- 
tion, and trouble, and temptations, and anxiety. 
The angels took his soul to the place where there 
is light without end, and rest without labour, 
and joy without sorrow, and plenty of all good 
things, and victory, and brightness and beauty. 
The place where there is health without pain, 
and youth without old age, and peace without 
disagreement, and music without affliction, and 
rewards without end." 

The snow-white farmhouse of Olegyr Foia 
nestles under the rock at the south-east side. 
Architecturally it is most interesting, as it gives 
an example of the famous round chimney which 
is peculiar to Celtic Pembrokeshire and which 
is rapidly vanishing away. The house has a 
stone porch with slabbed seats on either side ; 
the chimney rises between the porch and the 
pent-house roofed recess on the other side. 



CHAPTER XXX 

RAMSEY ISLAND — GRASSHOLM AND THE GANNET 
COMMUNITY — THE ISLAND OF BIRDS — GWALES 
IN PENVRO — THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNO- 
CENTS — AN UNRECORDED VICTORY OF THE 
BRITISH NAVY 

Ramsey Island lies next door to St. David's, but 
the crossing is not to be made every day, and it 
is often hard to get boats and boatmen, and you 
may have to wait indefinitely if it be late autumn. 
The crossing is usually made from Porth Clais, and 
the excursion takes at least four to five hours, 
while a quarter of an hour's extra delay on the 
island itself may cause the losing of the tide for 
the return journey. A couple of hours on the 
island permits the climbing of Carn Llundain 
and the visiting of Twyn Llundain (why these 
two landmarks should be associated with London 
is not clear : perhaps because they are so remote 
from everything that is London's and London like). 
The only house on the island is near the landing- 
place, and half an hour's climb will carry you 
thence to the highest Carn, four hundred and forty- 
six feet. The top commands every point of 
interest — on the seaward side the Bishop and his 
Clerks, and the lighthouse on the South Bishop — 
and on the next horn, southward of St. Bride's 
Bay, Musslewick and Skomar Island and the 

316 



RAMSEY AND GRASSHOLM ISLANDS 317 

lighthouses at the mouth of Milford Haven. At 
spring-tides an ample reach of the Haven itself 
is visible just south of St. Bride's Hill across the 
Marloes cliffs. The view of St. David's is so 
elusive that a painter christened it " Hide and 
Seek Town." We should remember, as we look 
upon the formidable rocks christened the " Bishop 
and his Clerks " and watch the water racing north- 
ward past them, the old epigram which George 
Owen of Henllys fondly iterates in his Descrip- 
tion of Pembrokeshire. We had better give part 
of the passage in which it occurs : — 

\" Ramsey rangeth in order the Bishop and his Clearkes, 
being VII en in Noniber, all wayes seene at lowe water who 
are not without some small Quiristers, who shewe not them- 
selves, but at spring tydes and calm seas. The chiefest of 
theis ys called of the inhabitantes the Bishop rocke ; one 
other, Carreg u Rossan ; the third Divighe, the fourth 
Eniskir ; the rest as yet I have not learned their names. . . . 
The Bisho}) and those his Clerkes preach deadly doctrine to 
their winter audience, and are commendable for nothinge 
but for their good residence.'''' 

In another MS. said to be Owen's two more 
names of the Clerks are given : to wit, Given 
Cai^reg and Carreg Haivloe. George Owen tells 
us too that these rocks " are accompted a great 
danger to those that seek Milford coming from 
the southwest seas." 

When arranging the boat excursion for Ramsey, 
it is well to allow time for coasting the west cliffs, 
Ynys Bery and the whole circuit of the island. 
This should only be attempted under the care of 
a couple of boatmen. The tide in Ramsey Sound 
runs like a millrace, and needs much humouring 
with certain winds and uncertain currents. If 
you are yachting, you can sail on from Ramsey 



318 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

to Grassholm — the Island of Birds, the farthest 
west of the Welsh isles, and the actual spot called 
Gwales in the story of the sons of Llyr.* It is a 
spot where few people have set foot. Fortunately 
a Welsh artist, a bird-lover and a great traveller, 
Mr. T. H. Thomas, paid the island a visit and camped 
there with some friends one Whitsuntide, and he 
has very generously put his notes at my disposal. 

\" It was nightfall," says Mr. Thomas, " when 
with our multifarious belongings we scrambled 
up the rocks above the tiny landing-place on the 
island. We stumbled along among stones and 
puffin-burrows to a spot which one of the sailors 
had told us was the only camping-ground. We 
passed a painful hour of struggle in the darkness 
with our tent, but at last it was pitched well and 
truly and we, wrapped like mummies upon the 
ground, courted slumber. The island ' was full 
of noises ' : cries of birds strange to us, the beat of 
countless wings, the dash of billows, and a curious 
soughing noise beneath us, afterwards discovered 
to be the swirl of meeting waters in a cavern 
piercing the isle beneath the spot where we 
reposed. The cries of some of the sea-birds were 
sadness itself, and listening to them in the dark- 
ness the lament for Myrto by Andre Chenier 
came to mind : — 

' ' ' Pleurez, doux alcyons : 6 vous, oiseaux sacres, 
Oiseaux chers a Thetis, doux alcyons, pleurez ! 
Elle a vecu, Myrto ! ' 






* '■' And there they found a fair and regal spot overlooking 
the ocean, and a spacious hall therein. And they went into 
the hall, and two of its doors were open, but the third was 
closed, that which looked toward Cornwall " {The Mabin- 
ogion : "Bran wen, daughter of Llyr ")• 



RAMSEY AND GRASSHOLM ISLANDS 319 

"The morning light peering yellow through 
our canvas roof aroused us, and emerging from 
our tent we found ourselves in a realm of strange 
beauty. We were encamped upon a spot covered 
with vivid vegetation in a tiny ravine ; on either 
side were steep rocks of brightest orange colour, 
being covered with brilliant lichen. At either 
end the ravine was ' crowned by summer sea.' 
Every point, ledge, and cleft of the rocks around 
us was occupied by sea-birds, gulls, puffins, razor- 
bills, guillemots which rose at our apparition, 
with wild cries circled around, and then settled 
again to watch the intruders. During the night 
there had been inexplicable croakings in our tent ; 
these were now explained by the appearance of 
some puffins hopping in a bewildered manner 
from the tent, which was pitched over their 
burrows. 

-"Breakfast was the next thing, and while pre- 
paring we may think over the history of the 
isle. Very little can be gathered from maps and 
books ; Grassholm is an almost unconsidered islet. 
Owing to its westerly position few maps of Wales 
include it. It has always in historic periods been 
uninhabited, but our after observations led us to 
think there had been a prehistoric occupation. 
The only early map in which it appears is Kip's, 
which accompanies the 1637 edition of Camden's 
Britannia. There an island occupies the position 
of Grassholm, but is called Wallys (? Whales) 
Island. There is notice in Drayton's Polyolbion 
(1613), where ' Gresholme ' appears in the illustra- 
tion and lines occur in the poem : — 

" 'As Rat and Sheepy set to keep salrue Milford's mouth 
Exposed to Neptune's power — so Gresholme farre doth 
stand." 



320 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

"Although not directly describing Grassholm> 
there are passages referring to the ornithology 
of the West Coast and Island of Pembrokeshire 
in Camden which are worth transcription both 
for their quaintness and instructiveness. Speaking 
of Ramsey Island (in the Additions) the following 
account is given from a letter by the ' Revd. Mr. 
Nicholas Roberts, A.M., Rector of Lhan Dhewi 
Velpey,' of migratory sea-birds : — 

" ' To this Island and some rocks adjoining . . . 
the Bishop and his Clerks, do yearly resort, about 
the beginning of April such a number of birds of 
several sorts, that none but such as have been 
eyewitnesses can be prevailed upon to believe it ; 
all which after breeding here, leave us before 
August. They come and also leave constantly in 
the night-time, for in the evening the rocks shall 
be covered with them, and next morning not a 
bird to be seen, so in the evening not a bird shall 
appear, and the next morning the rocks be full. 
They also visit us commonly about Christmas, 
and stay a week or more, and then take their 
leave till breeding-time. Three sorts of these 
migratory birds are called in Welsh Mora, 
Poethwy, and Pal ; in English Eligug, Razorbill, 
and Puffin ; to which we may also add the Harry- 
bird.' Another interesting reference is made to 
the Peregrine Falcon, line specimens of which are 
still to be observed in the district. ' A noble kinde 
of Falcons have their airies here and breed in the 
rocks, which King Henry the Second, as Giraldus 
writeth, was wont to preferre before all others of 
that kind are those the skilful Faulconers cell 
Peregrines : for they have 

" 'Depressus capitis vertex oblougaque toto 
Corpore pennarum series pallentia crura 
Et graciles digiti ac sparsi, naresque rotuncUe. 



RAMSEY AND GRASSHOLM ISLANDS 321 

" 'Head flat and low, the plume in rewes along 
The body laid : legges pale and worn are found 
With slender clawes and talons there among 
And those wide-spread : the bill is hooked around.' 

" Breakfast over, we mounted the island to the 
west and soon found ourselves on the summit, 
where we were in face of a spectacle which none 
of us can ever forget. We were in a metropolis 
of birds ; thousands of white wings and breasts 
were before us, on the grey or orange rocks, all 
ringed about with the azure white-flecked sea 
and sky ; our ears were filled with a wild concert. 
Every rocky ledge and terrace had its rows of 
puffins, and among them guillemots and razor- 
bills, the latter often with their eggs beside them ; 
clinging under the ledges above the sea were the 
pearly kittiwakes, and here and there among the 
rocks a herring-gull could be seen sitting, and 
on a few points the black-headed gulls were 
perched regarding the scene with a view to the 
discovery of good fishing-grounds. High in the 
air a peregrine falcon soared. But on the western 
slope of the island, facing the great ocean, were 
the settlements of the gannets. Two of the 
highest rocks had been selected by them, and 
nests had been built upon every step of rock. 
Counting the two villages, more than two hundred 
solan geese were in view, each bird in beautiful 
snow-white plumage sitting on its dark-coloured 
nest of seaweed. With the morning sun lighting 
them up, and seen against the grey and orange 
rocks, they formed a beautiful sight which we 
longed to view more closely. 

" Not less amazing than the sight was the strange 
hubbub to the ear. Continually were heard the 
warning cry of each species, the subterranean 

21 



322 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 



' Oh ! ' of the puffins, and the fluster with which they 
dashed out of their burrows and sped, blundering 
against obstacles, down the slopes till they found 
a little vantage-point for flight. The razor-bills 
said ' Grr ' to us, with disfavour, and the kitti- 
wakes under the ledges, absorbed in eternal love- 
making, said ' itty wa-a-ke ' and 'a-a-oh-a,' or 
chirped ; the ' oyster-catchers ' whistled as they 
sped along; the herring-gull's gravely sonorous 
'Ah-ha-a!' sounded like a staccato warning against 
our proceeding further ; and the peregrine falcon, 
circling high in the air, continually kept up its 
piercing shriek of 'Ka-ka-ka-ka,' unwittingly telling 
us that her young were near. Under all this 
charivari there was the deep bourdon note of the 
sea as it boomed among the caverns below. 

" The island may be described as roughly a five- 
sided pyramid of perhaps four hundred feet high 
upon a base half a mile long east to west and a 
quarter broad ; each side is deeply grooved and 
filled with peaty soil. The island is walled with 
precipices of a hundred feet more or less. 

" Making our way to the gannet settlements, we 
had to cross the bare peat in which the puffins 
burrowed ; the patting of their feet had worn it 
bare of vegetation and the utmost care was 
requisite to prevent our breaking in unexpectedly 
upon their nests, so completely was the soil tun- 
nelled with the burrows in which they deposit 
their single dirty white egg. While some attended 
to their domestic duties, others sunned themselves 
in little mobs on the rocks, while at times a whole 
troop would take wing and, circling round the 
island, return to the spot they had left, or would 
alight on the sea and fish in long-extended curves. 
On land or on the wing the puffin is equally comic, 



ey 



RAMSEY AND GRASSHOLM ISLANDS 323 

his upright position, his dark back and white 
breast, his hooked red beak, and his little vermilion 
legs, or when flying his short wings and red webs 
sticking out like a red tail and looking like a big 
flying beetle, make him a perpetual diversion to 
the beholder. 

4* The settlement of the gannets, otherwise called 
solan-geese, is upon the western end of the island, 
at a point where the rocks rise most perpen- 
dicularly from the sea. This bird can only be seen 
breeding in two localities upon the English and 
Welsh shores, Lundy and Grassholm. The bird 
has great beauty ; the plumage is snowy white, 
except for a delicately shaded orange-yellow at the 
top of the head and back of the neck, and the 
pinion feathers, which are jet black ; the body is 
about the size of a domestic goose ; the beak, which 
is large and strong, is of a pale blue tint, and a 
somewhat similar hue lines the feet. The wings 
are of exceptional length and strength, being 
usually six feet from tip to tip — they are narrow, 
similar in shape to those of the albatross, to which 
the bird is probably little inferior in powers of 
flight. 

" As we came near the eyries many of the birds, 
one after another, with many preliminary com- 
plaints, rose from their nests, and advancing to 
the cliff edge, spread their splendid wings, then 
with magnificent action launched themselves into 
the air and flew to sea with astonishing speed and 
ease. We afterwards had opportunities for seeing 
these birds swoop upon the fish. Flying at a con- 
siderable distance above the water, they would 
suddenly descend with a swiftness and force far 
surpassing that of a hawk, which they can do 
in safety over the yielding element. 



324 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 






" At this first visit only did the birds rise at our 
approach. We carefully avoided quick gestures and 
cries, and they soon became accustomed to our 
presence, and, the gannets especially, would allow 
of our very near approach : there was something 
particularly pleasant in this kind of anserine 
fraternisation. 

"The nest of the gannet is a small mound of 
seaweed placed upon the bare rock in the most 
exposed situations ; the half-decayed seaweed ad- 
heres closely to the rock, and a few sticks may be 
roughly placed upon the seaweed. Upon the nest 
lies the single egg which the bird lays, at first 
a kind of greenish white with a scurfy surface, 
about the size of a large hen's egg but narrower 
in shape. During the period of incubation, being 
rolled over and over upon the dirty seaweed, it 
becomes a dark brown. In addition to the de- 
caying weed the presence of an ejected fish or two 
makes the nest not a savoury object. The gannet 
is one of the Pelicanidse, and retains in a pouch 
small fish, which it disgorges at the nest before 
again going fishing. We sat near them and 
watched their ways ; they sat stolidly, nearly all 
of them with their heads to the wind, and they 
seem careless sitters, as in some cases the eggs 
might be seen beside them. If one rose from her 
nest, the others made a discontented outcry and 
pecked at her as she waddled to the cliff's edge 
and were not above dragging bits out of her nest 
for their own use, and stealing her fish in her 
absence. Here and there among them a guillemot 
might be seen, beside it its beautiful turquoise egg 
deposited upon the bare rock. 

"In the side of the rock below the gannets 
was a kind of arched alcove, which was occupied 



RAMSEY AND GRASSHOLM ISLANDS 325 

by three pairs of kittiwakes, whose manners and 
customs quite represented those of the species 
generally at that particular time of the year. 
They were simply absorbed in love-making ; the 
beautiful little pearly creatures seemed to have 
been schooled in every possible variety of flirtation, 
and under every ledge of rock overhanging the 
sea these flirtations appeared to be going on. 
Their ways must be seen to be believed — and, in 
fact, only Monsieur Daudet or Ohnet could possibly 
describe satisfactorily the events of these alcoves. 

" The young of the falcons are hatched in a 
hollow under a rock, a simple depression in the 
ground forming the nest. Though so young that 
they could hardly stand, they seemed able to fight, 
and wrestled together and bit each other like young 
bears. They were covered with pure white down. 
. " The nest of the black-backed gull showed us 
quite a rising family. A flat, saucer-like nest of 
dried grasses was a great centre of life, and all 
the children were getting on nicely. The eldest 
was a spotted, fawn-coloured puff of down, the 
second was not yet dried and combed from the 
egg, while the youngest was chipping his way out 
of the egg with many chirps, the egg meanwhile 
rolling over and over as the struggles of the chick 
changed its centre of gravity. 

" The whole of the island is a mass of intrusive 
rock, the eastern portion of a dark colour, a basalt 
or trap, becoming of a purplish tint upon the 
higher portions and at the western part, where it 
has to the eye the character of a porphyry. The 
stone is a dark purplish red lava of great hardness. 
At the eastern or landward end is a fault which 
exhibits a very curious character, which the action 
of the sea has accented. Great movement has 



326 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

taken place, and a gash exists right across the 
islet. I could not determine whether this fissure 
has ever been filled with solid rock and then 
breached by chemical and sea action, but at 
present it is entirely arched over by a breccia of 
blocks of various rocks, most of them angular, 
but a few more or less rounded boulders, some 
of which are of great size. The southern end of 
this chasm is at the small beach where we landed, 
at which the conglomerate can be easily studied, 
then masked by a deep mass of peaty soil it crosses 
the island and assumes a highly picturesque aspect 
at its northern end, where a large oval boulder is 
supported right in the centre of the section of the 
conglomerate arch, forming a sort of architrave to 
a gloomy portal, below which at a depth of thirty 
feet or so the waves heave and stream into the 
resounding cavern corridor. This entrance is very 
weird-looking ; the walls are high and dark, many 
nests of sea-birds are about it, the denizens flying 
in screaming squadrons to and fro, the waters 
heave and fall in a ' darkness visible,' and the 
cavern is resonant with the hissing of sea-spray 
and the gloomy mutterings of the billows as they 
meet with the waves from the other entry in the 
bowels of the earth. 

" Outside the cavern a seal was seen disporting 
itself, which probably had its home in the cave. 
We were afterwards given to understand that 
seals breed there, and that a local person, whose 
position is such that he should know better, goes 
over occasionally to shoot them. 

" A few rock specimens collected, Mr. Storrie 
described as diabasic rock containing epidote, and 
a softer purplish red rock was a consolidated 
volcanic ash now decomposing. 



RAMSEY AND GRASSHOLM ISLANDS 327 

" The probability of the island containing traces 
of occupation in prehistoric ages has been sug- 
gested in consequence of our observation of distinct 
traces of erections or enclosures upon the higher 
parts of the island, upon examining which closely 
we collected flint chips, portions of sun-dried 
pottery, and other objects. 

" We had ordered the cutter to return for us 
on Whit Monday, but we could not tear ourselves 
away from the island, so only Mr. West, who was 
tied by engagements, left, and the rest of us set 
to our occupations, I going to renew my acquaint- 
ance with the gannets. Among them I was, if not 
welcomed, at least permitted, and I began some 
sketching until I heard the fell ' crack' of a rifle 
break in upon our millennium. Then commenced a 
series of events upon which this is not the place 
to enlarge, except in so far as was reported to a 
Society, the name of which frequently came up 
in regard to the proceedings which followed : — 
N " ' An attack was made upon the settlement of 
gannets by a company on board H.M.S. Sir Richard 
Fletcher, followed by a landing and general battue 
upon shore, terminating in the slaughter of many 
birds, several gannets, and the destruction of the 
whole of the eggs of the latter. We considered 
that the facts should be reported, which we did 
in a letter to the Daily Graphic. The press, local 
and general, emphasised our complaint, and ques- 
tions were asked in the House by Mr. Webster, 
M.P. for St. Pancras, who had been informed by 
the Bath Selborne Society, and by Sir Hussey 
Vivian. The Government shielded the offenders, 
who were military and volunteer officers, so it was 
left to private enterprise to bring the matter home 
to them. The case was taken up by the Royal 



328 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 
and, with great difficulty, for here again the local 
authorities were most reluctant to move, Mr. R. I. 
Colam, the able and energetic secretary, obtained, 
at Haverfordwest Sessions, a verdict against the 
marauders. The Society considered the case one of 
the most important they had fought, and spoke 
of it " as the most wanton violation of the law for 
the protection of birds " that had occurred since 
the enactment of the Statute. From that Society, 
from the Bath Branch of the Selborne Society, and 
from the central Selborne Society in London, we 
received votes of commendation for moving in 
the matter. Full details of the whole case may 
be found in the September number of the Animal 
World, 1890.' 

" A large case containing a gannet, puffins, 
guillemots, &c, killed by the party from the 
steamer, is now set up in the Cardiff Museum with 
a background painted to represent the gannet 
settlement." 



CHAPTER XXXI 

THE NORTH PEMBROKE COAST — FISHGUARD AND 
GOOD WICK — THE VICTORY OF JEMIMA — DIN AS 
HEAD — SEALS AND WILD GOATS — NEWPORT — 
PRECELLY TOP 

Working north along the Pembroke coast from 
St. David's, you have a stretch to explore which 
had been rather neglected by the later Welsh 
antiquaries, when that excellently reminiscent 
newspaper, the Pembroke Guardian, appeared on 
the scene under the lead of Mr. H. W. Williams, 
of Solva. 

Two roads run parallel to the coast-line for some 
miles. The lower touches Llanrian and Trevine ; 
the upper and better road so far as mere 
travelling goes, runs by Croesgoch to Mathry. In 
either case the traveller, if he be bent on antiquity, 
will wish he had taken the other. For this part 
of Dewisland is fairly studied with remains — 
cromlechs on the moors, cliff-castles by the sea — 
worth hunting for. Every village you pass has 
some old stone or other built in a wall or doorway 
to rouse your curiosity and make you wish 
secretly to unbuild and examine it. As for the 
cromlechs at Llanrian and at Mathry, they are 
known things ; and Sir Norman Lockyer's theory 
that a cromlech was a cell of the living and not 

329 



330 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

merely of the dead lends them the interest of 
fresh discovery. In the same way, Mr. Edward 
Laws has helped to make his Pembroke neighbours 
aware of a new human interest in the cliff-castles, 
which were usually put down to the strategic 
convenience of the Black Pagans — the Wickings. 
But many of them were evidently not forts 
intended to be a base for sea-pirates' raids inland, 
but the abode of cliff-dwellers who lived on roots 
and shell-fish. A month spent in exploring the 
coast here, with a sketch-book to help the inves- 
tigation, will go far to clear a way into the 
primitive life of the Welsh coast centuries before 
the Romans came. 

Gerald the Welshman speaks of the country 
near St. David's as stony, barren, unimprovable 
territory, without any pleasant meadows, a place 
of wind and storm. A tourist of a hundred years 
ago adds that " the rocks on this shore are shaken 
into every possible shape of horror," and says he 
found not a glimpse of smiling nature to relieve 
his aching sight. As there are no hedges, he adds, 
even the sheep and the geese have to be tethered 
together. One may add that nowhere in Wales 
can one get such a sensation of sheer loneliness. 
Yet 1 seem to remember blue and white skies 
and radiant days, and a delicious short thymy 
sea-turf on some of the barest outliers of this 
coast, flanked too by a sea of such colour that it 
stained one's eyes with Italian blue for hours 
afterwards. 

Fenton opened a tumulus near Castell Havod, 
which has been called both Danish and Roman, 
and is neither. At Trevaen — the Three Stones — 
are the remains of what were called Bishop 
Martin's Palace. 



THE NORTH PEMBROKE COAST 331 

You pass three more cromlechs before you come 
to your last mile at Goodwick. This promoted 
village now forms one side of the harbour and 
seaport, with Fishguard on the other, that stand 
on the world's highway and provide a new through- 
connection on the Great Western sea-route. The 
south-west corner of Fishguard Bay, well sheltered 
from the prevailing winds and the worst seas that 
affect this coast, offers good space for quays and 
a safe landing, and the Bay a good road for big 
ships to lie at anchor. The railway has already 
equipped a dock and built steamers, and converted 
a country-house into a hotel — the "Wyncliff" — 
which is everything that the ordinary railway 
hotel is not, ensconced as it is in a green corner 
of the cliff above the new harbour works, with a 
wild headland beyond and remains of cromlechs 
almost at its back-door. On reaching the terminus 
and alighting, you have the village rising on your 
left and stretching along the cliff, a mixture of 
brand-new houses and nice old cottages, while to 
the right you have the flat salt-marsh with the 
road to Fishguard running behind the gravel bank 
of the beach across it. 

At the very high tides this half-mile or more 
of beach is reduced to a narrow strip or to nothing, 
and the sand is hardly of Tenby quality. The 
rocks on either side of Fishguard Bay are basaltic, 
and take at the neighbouring corner of " Pen- 
anglas " and elsewhere most curious shapes. 
Hence the queer name given them by the Fish- 
guard children — " torthau ceiniogau " — i.e., penny 
loaves. 

The headland on which the village of Llanwnda 
stands high can be reached by the Llanwnda road, 
or by the slant path climbing the heathy slope 



332 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

behind the Wyncliff Hotel. Llanwnda is the only- 
parish in Wales or Great Britain that can claim 
to have been invaded by, and to have itself 
defeated, a French array. To be sure, it seems in 
the retrospect a comedy invasion ; but it roused 
terror enough at the time. The place, says the 
Cambrian Guide, was for ages obscure, till Tuesday, 
the 20th of February, 1797, when three large 
vessels were discovered standing in from the 
channel, and nearing the rocky coast of Llanwnda. 
These were supposed to be becalmed merchant- 
men, coming to anchor in order to wait the 
return of the tide, or a brisker gale ; but on 
their nearer approach, a most serious alarm was 
excited." After a pause indeed the English colours 
were struck, and the French tricolour was boldly 
displayed ; and at nightfall " boats were seen 
putting off from their sides, full of men, followed 
by others fully manned, and in such rapid suc- 
cession as to leave no doubt of their being an 
enemy. They disembarked at Aber-y-felin, rolling 
their casks of ammunition up a precipitous steep ; 
a task so herculean as almost to exceed credibility. 
The night was dark, and in consequence the 
number of the enemy could not be ascertained ; 
the inhabitants in the vicinity deserted their 
houses, and taking refuge among rocks and furze, 
waited within sight of their dwellings, expecting 
to see them ravaged and burnt. The townsmen 
of Fishguard caught the general panic, and rapidly 
removed their wives, children, and valuables. The 
first impulse of the invading crew was to satisfy 
hunger ; the fields were occupied in the business 
of cookery, and the order of the night was 
plunder ! Gluttony was succeeded by intoxica- 
tion. A wreck of wine had occurred a few days 



THE NORTH PEMBROKE COAST 333 

before, and every cottage was supplied with a 
cask." 

• At Trehowel Farm, the master of the house, 
believing the vessels to be English, prepared a 
great supper for their officers, and only escaped 
at the last moment. In all, thirty to forty farms 
and many cottages were raided, but the local 
historian says, "wonderfully little mischief and 
scarcely any violence was done." It was the more 
surprising as the invaders were mainly French 
convicts. " At a farm called Cotts, a poor woman 
recently confined had been abandoned by her 
cowardly husband. When the Frenchmen entered 
the house, in her despair she held up her baby 
in her arms " — and, respecting her condition, they 
soothed her fears and left her in peace. In all, 
two Welshmen (who had already attacked and 
killed one Frenchman) were killed ; one young 
woman was shot and ill-treated, but survived, and 
a Solva sailor was wounded. Meanwhile, Lord 
Cawdor at Stackpole and Lord Milford were able, 
on receiving the alarm, to muster some seven 
hundred and fifty militiamen and yeomanry ; and 
these, with the aid of Captain William Davios, who 
had seen some service, were disposed to look as 
formidable as possible. But the Fishguard version 
of the story of this gallant defence is the most 
gratifying : and in this it was the great Jemima 
in her het befr and her " red shawl " (shol Jemima) 
who was both heroine and commander-in-chief of 
the victorious Welsh battalion that figured in the 
heights above Fishguard. 

It was Wednesday when the invaders landed. 
On Thursday, at noon, when they were posted 
above the village of Llanwnda, the French frigates 
surprised both friends and foes ashore by setting 



334 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

sail. That night an attack was planned by the 
allied forces, led by Lord Cawdor and the gallant 
Jemima ; but luckily was not carried out. Then 
two French officers came over to Fishguard, under 
a flag of truce : a council of war at the " Royal 
Oak," Fishguard, followed ; and a game of bluff, 
in which an English officer lied to admiration, 
multiplied the English forces in his account by 
ten, resulted in the preliminary compliments to 
the surrender of the French forces on the fol- 
lowing day, which took place duly at Goodwick. 
Thence the whole force of prisoners was marched 
off to Haverfordwest Castle. The French 
soldiers, says Mr. Laws, were clad in old English 
uniforms, re-dyed a rusty brown, and still furnished 
with regimental buttons ; with these they wore 
black belts and old cavalry helmets. So ended 
this comedy of war, which, however, was meant 
seriously enough. 

Welsh shawls that will wear for ever are still 
made at Fishguard, which has had for long a 
reputation for homespun. The town enjoys the 
privileges of an old borough. It was built, you 
will observe, in two halves : known locally as the 
" town " and the " lower town." The latter, which 
is probably the older of the two, explains the 
Welsh name " Abergwaen," since it lies at the 
aber or outlet of the little Gwaen river, enclosed 
in a sheltering sea-cwm. 

Approaching Fishguard from Goodwick Station, 
the road makes a sharp zigzag up the bank at 
the end of the marshy level — scene of the old 
battle-field where Trahearn ap Caradog defeated 
Rhys ab Owain — sometimes known as Goodwick 
Moor. The bank brings the bicyclist off his 
machine, and makes the average Fishguard horse 




THE CASTLE, NEWPORT, PEMBROKESHIRE. 




I'ln-U 



Aberystwyth. 



f.LECH-Y-DRYBEDD CROMLEC II. 



THE NORTH PEMBROKE COAST 335 

drop his head and prepare for a pull. Avoiding 
the road which runs off to the right of the village, 
you are soon in the " Square." The town will not 
delay you if you are a tourist ; but below its 
apparent ugly surface it is full of character. 
Besides its own particular creek and beach, Fish- 
guard, too, has on the north a good stretch of 
coast — rock and grassy cliffs and miniature moun- 
tains — including Ceiliog Goch and Penrhyn 
Ychain, and the sea-commanding outposts of 
Cam Fran and Cam Gelli. 

Nearly opposite a draper's shop in the main 
street, as you leave the square on the way to 
the lower town, you may see the memorial stone 
to the redoubtable Jemima, after whom the red 
shawl, known locally as "shol Jemima," took its 
name. The monument may easily be deciphered 
through the railings, and the inscription shows 
plainly that it was the Amazon cohort in the 
" shol goch," and not the magnificent lies of one 
English officer, or the parade of the Pembroke 
fencibles, who saved Great Britain from the 
enemy and the invader. Jemima was, I believe, 
like Meg Merrilies, "as tall as Amazon," and of 
great muscular strength. She was a cobbler by 
trade, and her craft should certainly enshrine her. 

Above the "lower town," where Jemima lived 
and cobbled, the Gwaen flows past the remains 
of an old British town near the old quarry at 
Caerau. The road from the square in the town 
above which runs to Pontvaen, up the Gwaen 
valley, brings one to Caerau by a track across 
the meadows of Caerau Farm on the left ; and 
on the other side of the river you have " Hen 
Fynwent " — an old burial-ground, as its name 
tells you. 



336 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

North of Fishguard lies Dinas Head with its 
cliffs and vast cave, through which a boat may 
pass at half ebb, as wild a piece of architecture 
as sea ever carved. Llanllawer Court lies at the 
western end of the hill in the Gwaen valley, in 
a very covetable site. One of the fairest of 
riverside roads traverses this wooded vale on to 
Pontvaen and beyond. Emerging at length, the 
wayfarer crosses the moorish, treeless uplands 
of Carn Ingli Common and so reaches Newport. 
Dinas Head is locally called the " Island," the 
little Dinas' mill-brook serving to island it on 
the east. The sea is making vigorous inroads 
on the north side of the Head, at Cwm-yr-Eglwys, 
the green cwm where the ruined church and 
some dilapidated cottages bear testimony to its 
advance. 

Some years ago, accompanied by the hereditary 
chieftain of this district who is also an incorri- 
gible book-hunter, and the author of Ffordd y 
Troseddwr and other novels (now alas ! a B.C.L. 
and M.P.), I and G. R. took boat at Cwm-yr-Eglwys 
beach, and explored the great cave. The boat, 
it may be said, was manned by a famous crew 
consisting entirely of retired sea-captains, some 
six or seven. They rowed us right into the mouth 
of the cavern, a great Gothic water-church, with 
mysterious and awful recesses. Two of us landed, 
if I rightly remember, on one ledge in the chancel, 
and on the way back we just saw a seal's head, 
like a big water-rat's, before he dived. 

On the grassy cliffs of the island the last herd 
of wild goats in "Wales still pastures ; and as the 
boat carried us round the headland two of the 
nimble beasts could be seen browsing on the verge 
of the precipice. The whole island is held as one 



THE NORTH PEMBROKE COAST 337 

farm, and by the same family (Raymond by name) 
that has held it for centuries. 

Going north-east from Dinas Cross, you reach 
Newport about a league along the Cardigan road. 
Like the other Newport, the town has a past. A 
plague in the sixteenth century is but a thing 
of yesterday, as you realise on surveying its 
castle and asking how Parrog got its name. 
Across the river, which can be forded when the 
tide and flood-water permit, or crossed by the 
new bridge from Parrog Terrace, lies a second 
range of sands, the Berry sands, under Berry 
Hill (so called from the old demesne of Bury). 
A path runs along the cliffs toward Aberfforest ; 
and there are no end of summer loitering-places 
on one beach or the other. Near the Berry bridge 
is a cromlech — one of the series that may yet 
make the North Pembroke coast famous in the 
history before history. Newport Castle, still used 
as a dwelling-house (sometime occupied by Mr. 
Brett, the sea-painter), has fine gateway towers ; 
but the cromlechs were already old when it was 
built. 

Still further up the hill, a hundred yards to 
the left of the same road, is the site of the Castle 
of Llanhyvor, the " Castrum de Llanhover " men- 
tioned by Gerald, which was built by Martin 
de Tours ; and afterwards, it is said, relinquished 
for the new castle he had built at Newport. Its 
grass-grown vestiges show it was probably de- 
serted early in the Castle period. 

But the Nevern "lion" of antiquity is the fine 
Pentre Evan cromlech, about half an hour's walk 
from the church, across the river and beyond the 
Cardigan high-road. Within the last four or five 
years it has for protective purposes been sur- 

22 



338 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

rounded by a wire fence. It stands on the moor 
above the old house of Pentre Evan, now a farm 
but once a mansion of some state. It is as well 
to ask for directions at the Penaf Wern-ddu 
Farm, beyond Pentre half a mile, as the cromlech 
is difficult to find. The capstone of this cromlech 
is nearly seventeen feet long, nearly nine feet 
broad, and three deep ; it stands nearly nine feet 
from the ground. The capstone weighs from ten 
to twelve tons. 

Straight from the cromlech from Nevern you 
ought to find your way to Castell Mawr, 2£ miles 
east of it : a wonderful camp, only less interesting 
than Cam Goch. Descending from the camp to 
the valley of the Nevern, you will find a valley- 
scene wild as any north or south, at the Gelli 
rocks, which look much more like a castle than 
does Castell Mawr. The river-cliff architecture 
there suggests the region of Don Quixote. Indeed, 
the rocks near Melin-y-Gigfran (Raven's Mill) may 
easily pass for enchanted, like those in the Cornish 
tale of the Trolls wrestling, if you chance that 
way at dusk.* One evening, driving over to Dinas 
Cross in a crazy gig, we certainly saw strange 
things there at nightfall. But then we had a 
driver, a small boy, who was not sure of the 
road, and we were light-headed from hunger 
after a railway journey. 

Cam Engli may be ascended from the lane 
behind Newport Church, and from various points 
above in the upper road, which makes a detour 
to the Gwaen valley and Fishguard. The Gwaen 
cuts off Cam Engli from the westward heights 
of Precelly, to whose range it belongs : George 

* Hunt's Romances and Drolls of the West of England, see 
p. 241 : " The Hooting Cairn " (Cairn Kenidzhek). 



THE NORTH PEMBROKE COAST 339 

Owen's picture of Cam Engli is as true now as 
the day it was " painted " : — 

"The high sharpe rocke over Newport, called Cam 
Englyn, supposed by the vulgar to take its appellative from 
a Cawr or giant of that name, is a very steepe and stony 
mountaine, having the toppe thereof sharp, and all rockes 
shewing from the E. and by N. like the upper part of the 
capital Greek omega (Q). The pasture of this mountaine 
was given in common by Nicholaus filius Martini, then 
lord of Kernes, to the burgesses of his town of Newport, 
which they enjoy to this day, with divers other freedomes 
and liberties to them granted by divers charters yet extant 
and faire, sealed with his seale of the armes of the saide 
lordshipp of Kernes, but all of that antiquity that they are 
sans date. This mountaine is several miles in circuit, and 
surmounteth all other for good sheep pasture, both for 
fatting and soundness, and especially commodious in this, 
that noe snowe stayeth on it, by reason of the neernes 
of the sea, and that it is watered with fine and cleare 
springes. Frenny-faicr, the first and most easterly point 
of the long Presselly line, and this the last and most w., 
Cam Englyn, stand as captaine and lieutenant, the one 
leading the vannegarde, the other following the rere-warde, 
among whom Cwm Cericyn, being neere middway between 
them, may well, for his high stature overlooking the rest, 
clayme the place of standard-bearer." 

To Owen's account we may add that Cam 
Engli, like Moel Tri-garn, has many hut-circles 
within a brief walk westward of the chief earn, 
which is just a thousand feet above sea-level, and 
commands a superb view of nearly all the Welsh 
heights of consequence, from Precelly to Plyn- 
limmon, from Cader Idris to the peaks which 
determine the great curved rampart of mountains 
around Cardigan Bay. 

Precelly Mountain can be attacked from New- 
port if you are making that place your centre. 



340 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

But if you work from Fishguard you can use 
the railway that skirts the mountain, take train 
ingloriously to Rosebush Station, whence the 
climbing of Precelly top is easy. Rosebush, in 
fact, is within an hour's easy climb of the 
summit, and if the adventure ends there it need 
not ask more than an afternoon holiday or the 
time between two trains. 

But it must be held in mind that Precelly is a 
rather coy creature. She makes up for her 
smaller stature by her cloudy elusions. You may 
take train to her side on the clearest, bluest 
summer morning to find a white shawl hiding 
her pretty head. In fact, it is as well before 
starting to take the advice of some native who 
has used the " Top " as a sort of weather-glass 
for forty or fifty years. Venture then at your 
peril, even if he says decisively it is " goin' to be 
f a'r ! " June and September are the months when 
clear days most do occur. 

Rosebush itself is no more than a row of 
quarrymen's cottages with an adjacent hotel to 
cater for visitors. On leaving the station, turn 
to the left of the hotel and the cottages, and 
take the path ascending above the quarry. The 
track lies straight before, unmistakably making 
for the top of the nearer ascent. The whole 
climb need not occupy more than an hour, though 
in wet weather there are one or two swampy 
passages. From the first and highest of the 
summits Moel Cwm Cerwyn, or the " Top," you 
see southward all the mingled loveliness and 
dreariness of Pembrokeshire : its woods and shel- 
tered vales, its curled, interminable coast-line and 
grey seaward levels. The woods about the Cleddau, 
almost direct south, at Slebech and Picton, partly 



THE NORTH PEMBROKE COAST 341 

hidden, fill in a darker green space in late summer. 
To the left lie Carmarthen Bay and Worm's Head 
and the western end of Gower ; to the right 
George Owen's " tree " — that is Milf ord Haven — less 
like a tree than a confused water-snake, some of 
its brown or blue folds hidden, Pembroke Castle 
set in its middle coil. Direct north, most im- 
pressive of all, are the Eifl mountains and part 
of Snowdon, seen across Cardigan Bay. Westward, 
or slightly south-westward, we have the peninsula 
and headland of St. David's — rather featureless 
in effect as seen from this height. St. David's 
Cathedral is hidden. But beyond the St. David's 
promontory and island spurs, on a very clear day 
with a north-westerly wind, the coast of Ireland 
can be spied like a lower sky. 

One of the separate arms of Precelly, Freni 
Fawr ("Y Frenhin Fawr," or the Great King?) 
1,287 feet above sea-level, becomes a very familiar 
landmark on the right as one travels by train 
along its skirts from Crymmych Arms to Cardigan ; 
and from the former station it is only an hour's 
climb to the summit. Or, having ascended Precelly 
Top from Rosebush, the inveterate hill-walker who 
is not content will have no trouble in exploring 
the whole ridge eastwards to Moel Trigarn. Des- 
cending at Crymmych Arms, he can spend the 
night there. Moel or Foel Trigarn is so called 
because of its three great cairns. Many stone 
circles, or " cyttiau," are scattered on the slopes. 
An ancient Roman way runs along the five miles 
of mountain-top between Moel Trigarn and Moel 
Cwm Cerwyn, which was used by Welsh and 
Fleming too, to judge by the name "Via Flan- 
drica," by which it went. 



CHAPTER XXXII 

CARDIGAN — CILGERRAN CASTLE — ST. DOGMELL'S — 
THE STORY OF PERGRIN — GWBERT-ON-SEA 

At the time when Welsh legends were exported to 
France and Normandy, Cardigan was always a 
name to charm with ; and something of that effect 
the place and its sleepy streets and quays, castle 
and bridge, contrive still to keep. It was " to a 
Castle hight Cardigan " that Sir Percival and 
Sir Agloval came riding once toward the end of 
the Quest of the Grail. But at midnight Percival 
stole away mysteriously. When you cross the 
bridge into the town, and spy the Castle, you 
wonder which road he took ? Was the Priory 
into which he and Sir Ector wished to be carried 
next day St. Dogmell's ? 

In crossing Cardigan Bridge you leave Pem- 
brokeshire — in which Cardigan railway station is 
placed — for the neighbour-county. The bridge — 
as old prints declare — made a better picture for- 
merly, and a much better lounging-place, with 
bays at every parapet. When it was built the 
Castle commanded it, as Speed's map of the year 
1610 shows. The Castle ruins have dwindled by 
half in the last three centuries, if we may take 
his view as at all accurate. Its curtain-wall, ivy 
grown, and a part of two gateway towers are all 

342 



CARDIGAN 343 

that greet the eye now ; and as the interior forms 
an adjunct to a private house, it is not open to 
every visitor. The old parish church lies off to the 
right of the Castle, but the stranger to Cardigan, if 
he wishes to exploit the town, will follow the usual 
route up the narrow ascent of Bridge Street. The 
entrance to the Castle is on the right hand, as we 
enter the High Street ; and just before it stood 
the town " Cross," round which the open market 
used to be held, with the old Shire Hall, turned 
into a warehouse now, old Market Lane and St. 
Mary Street to fill in other details. One of the 
most puzzling of the street names in Speed's plan 
is " Pole Hey "—i.e., " Y Pwllai." The Pwllai runs 
out into the foot of St. Mary Street, making a 
curve to the east of the old town wall, for Car- 
digan was a walled town, needing its defences to 
keep out freebooters like Maelgan. But the siege 
of Cardigan by Cromwell's men in the Civil War 
worked havoc in town walls and Castle alike. 

Cardigan Church, as it stands amid its ecclesi- 
astical elms and beeches, is an architectural 
medley which age has tempered and made into a 
whole of some dignity. The big battlemented 
tower has a capital outlook from its platform, 
worth the toil of the many stairs leading to it. 
It is not of any age to speak of, dating from 1710 
onwards — the old tower having collapsed a few 
years before. The chancel is an extreme contrast 
— a fine Decorated building, with airy pinnacles to 
its machicolated roof. Close to the church the 
Priory stands upon the site of a small Black 
Friars' house, only one or two fragments of 
whose walls remain. 

The Priory is famous because here for some 
years lived the "Matchless Orinda," Mrs. Catherine 



344 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Philipps, who came hither from London on her 
marriage in 1647, a girl of sixteen, to a local squire 
James Philipps, who was High Sheriff of the 
county in 1649. The "Matchless Orinda" died in 
1664; her poems, born of a delicately imaginative 
mind, are still to be read with something of the 
wonder that Henry Vaughan, a you g poet at 
that time, felt when he spoke of them as a 
miracle — 

"Which Nature brought but once to pass, 
A Muse such as Orinda was." 

From the Priory gate you can step quickly to 
the riverside, as I daresay Orinda often did ; and 
there at the Cardigan Boating Club's house, a little 
further up the strand, you can hire a boat and row 
up to Kilgarren. Once with Mr. Walter Spurrell of 
Carmarthen, I made this voyage, and we had to 
haul the boat over two tough gravelly reaches; 
but we had our solace in the deep, shut-in, over- 
grown Teivy pools, where the sea-birds met with shy 
river-fowl, wild duck, and red-throated divers, and 
in our arrival at last under the broken banks of 
the Castle at the mouth of the Cwm Plysgog. 

Up above, a closer acquaintance with the walls 
was not so inspiriting. The site there at the 
meeting of the Teivy with Nant Plysgog amid the 
steep slate-cliffs is fine enough for everything. 
There is an adventurous tower, too, where the 
ravines, big and little, meet, an outlook tower or 
yucrite, which stirs the besieger's blood as he 
prepares to rush the bank. But the boys of the 
quarry-village near by had left the stairs, when 
we stormed them, in a condition to repel any 
invader. Howbeit it is a glorious structure, and 




Photo by] 



Prof. >. Morgan Lewis, Aberystwyth. 
CORACLES ON THK TEIVY. 




CARDIGAN BRIDGE 

From ;m old painting. 



To face p. 345. 



CARDIGAN 345 

the two strong citadel-towers, seen across the ward, 
are worthy of the old threatening name Cilgerran 
bore in the Castle time. 

The first Norman castle here was begun by Hugo 
de Montgomery. Then Gilbert Strongbow tried 
his hand on it. Rhys ap Griffith took it from 
the Normans, and held it at his pleasure. Then 
came William Marshall, twenty-five years after 
Rhys's death, and began a castle on a bigger scale 
altogether. Previously Giraldus had seen the Castle 
on his "Itinerary" of 1188, and spoken of the salmon 
that swam and the beavers that built their dams 
in the Teivy stream. Joan, whose grandfather 
was William Marshall, had Cilgerran as part of 
her dot when she married William de Valence : and 
this led the Castle into many fighting combination-. 
But it remained intact all through the gunless 
mediaeval days, and had its great commotion only 
in the Civil War, when Cromwell's guns made 
the big breach in the south-western tower, and 
prepared the place for the slow ruin which you 
see at work. 

Cilgerran Church, rebuilt in 1855, has a good 
tower, recently retopped but older than the rest 
of the building. In the churchyard, on the side 
nearest the gate, is an Ogam stone, the monu- 
ment of Trenegussus, son of Macutrenus — so far 
as Sir John Rhys has deciphered the much-worn 
ogams. In Cilgerran Church lies buried Dr. 
Thomas Phaer, who translated Virgil's iBneid 
into English, and who lived at the old mansion 
called " Forest," amid the trees of Cefn Drum, 
which we passed on our right on the way up the 
river. He died in 1560. 

Cilgerran is now a great quarrymen's village ; 
and it was once a town with aldermen and every- 



346 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

thing proper about it. The Cefn Quarries, which 
lie within a few minutes of Cilgerran railway- 
station, and the upper village, which its inhabi- 
tants call Cnwca — it is said from some old tumps 
in the near neighbourhood. 

If you go to Cilgerran by road your route can 
be varied on the way back by a path which leads 
from Cwm Plysgog and up the bank beyond it, 
past Dr. Phaer's old house, through the lane under 
the trees of Cefn Drum, and so across the railway 
and Pentood Marsh to the town. 

A mile or less from the town the Abbey of St. 
Dogmell's — " Abbaty Llandydoch" — has little of 
its fine church and attractive buildings left ; and 
the present church is a poor enough apology for 
it. In the village retired Welsh sea-captains and 
Teivy salmon fishermen live on the long-extended 
street and in the cottages beyond posted on the 
green banks and foot-hills. You turn to the left 
for St. Dogmell's on reaching the Bridge-end side 
of Cardigan bridge ; and gaining the outskirts, 
have the church on your left just beyond Cwm 
Tegwel. The Abbey ruins lie chiefly within the 
Vicarage grounds ; one of the transepts, some of 
the main walls and cloister walls, and some of 
the kitchen and domestic offices and a detached 
guest-house, are about all that remains of them. 
An Ogam stone, that was carried off, and then 
by good hap recovered, stands against the refec- 
tory wall ; the letters read : " Sagrani Fili Cuno- 
tami " ; but who Sagranus or Cunotamus was I 
leave you to conjecture. St. Dogmell's parish 
church of to-day is some fifty years old or 
more ; and is not interesting. 

On a hot July afternoon St. Dogmell's seems 
almost interminable ; but at length, if you keep 



CARDIGAN 347 

the riverside road, turning off from the village* 
you pass a coastguard station and then half a 
mile further on reach an estuary-side strand, a 
sort of mixture of village green and sands. This 
strand is known as the " Poppit " ; and the local 
guide-book hints that a watering-place has been 
projected there by a company. The two or three 
available lodging-houses near it are in great 
demand in the summer and autumn. 

Beyond the " Poppit " you come to Penrhyn 
Castle Bay, with the river-bar between it and 
Gwbert Bay opposite. Lifeboat and coastguard 
station are within the west scoop of the bay ; 
the hill above Penrhyn Farm commands a fine 
view of the coast, up and down ; and farm roads 
and lanes that hug the coast southward can be 
followed on to Moylgrove, past Pen-yr-Afr and 
Pwll Gronant — a rather desolate sea-walk on a 
grey day. There is little to see at Moglgrove, 
but a mile from the village is Ceibwr Bay — a 
good spot for a stolen bathe. Here, and at the 
Witch's Cauldron in the next sea-cwm, was a 
famous old smugglers' haunt. The Cauldron is 
a most mischievous cave and in its depths are 
fabulous treasures if they could only be got at ? 

Across the water lies Gwbert-on-Sea, whose 
downs and sands, rocks and caves, are contrived 
after a rather seductive fashion. It has a good 
safe beach for timid bathers, and deep-water 
inlets for divers and good swimmers. The road 
thither from Cardigan was rough, with loose 
sandy stretches interspersed, when I cycled over 
it; but no doubt that is altered now. At one 
point beyond the grassy dunes and sand burrows 
of Towyn Warren I remember a wonderful out- 
look over the Teivy estuary and its surroundings 



348 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

on both sides the river-mouth, including St. Dog- 
mell's and the hills about Newport and Precelly, 
and the sea bright beyond Gwbert. It called to 
mind the spacious approach to Southerndown on 
just such another bright-aired afternoon. 

If you go out fishing off the mouth of the Teivy, 
you should recall the story of Pergrin and the 
Mermaid. Pergrin was a St. Dogmell's fisherman 
who one day spied in a rocky cleft near Pen 
Cemmes a sea-maid engaged at the immemorial 
task of combing her beautiful hair. He contrived 
to seize her and take her off to his boat, the while 
she wept piteously, her hair all dishevelled about 
her, begging him for mercy. But he would not 
give way to her cries until in an agony she said, 
" Pergrin, let me go, and I will give thee three 
shouts in the hour of need ! " 

So, what with wonder and fear, he let her go 
to walk the street of the deep and visit her lovers. 
Days and weeks went by without a sign of her. 
But one sultry afternoon, when the sea was calm 
enough, and the fishermen were plying their craft 
with no thought of a storm, Pergrin suddenly 
heard a voice in the water near his boat. It was 
the Mor-forwyn, or sea-maiden, whose upturned 
face and floating hair appeared like froth in the 
salt water, as she cried — 

" Pergrin I Pergrin ! Pergrin ! 
Haul in! Haul in! Haul in!" 

He and his mate at once obeyed, and hauled in 
their nets and made for the bar. By the time 
they got to Pwll Cam the most terrible storm 
broke that the coast had known. Twice nine 
other fishermen who had sailed out to the fishing- 



CARDIGAN 349 

grounds were caught in the storm and drowned. 
Only Pergrin and his mate stood safe on land, 
thanks to the three timely shouts given them by 
the sea-maid. 

The same story, or one very like it, is told on 
the coast of Lleyn, Carnarvonshire ; and it is 
even hinted that this is only a secondary version 
supplied by Gwynionydd.* But there are mer- 
maid stories on every coast, and I fancy there is 
much folk-lore and sea-lore yet waiting to be 
recovered at St. Dogmell's. 

* See Celtic Folklore, by (Sir) John Rhys, ch. ii., "The 
Fairies' Revenge" (pp. 163, 164). 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

THE CARDIGAN COAST — ABERPORTH — LLANGRANOG 
AND TRAETHSAITH — NEW QUAY — LLANDYSILIO — 
GOGO — ABERAERON 

Aberporth is some 1\ miles north of Cardigan 
town and about six or seven miles round the coast 
from Grwbert-on-Sea. Well situated on the porth 
or small harbour that gives it its name, it has 
two or three stretches of good sands, and it is 
yet unspoilt by too many villas and improvements. 
From Gwbert and northward, on past Aberporth 
and Traethsaith to Penbryn and Llangranog, this 
part of the coast is well built. 

Aberporth, however, is a civil resort ; that is to 
say, it has a choice of houses — bungalows, villas 
with gardens and tennis lawns, and at least three 
kinds of jam in the village commissariat. Long 
ago it was discovered by an artist looking for 
a new neighbourhood, and he is said to have 
made a fortune in Italian seascapes and land- 
scapes painted here. There is just enough sea- 
faring life in the harbour to serve artistic ends. 
About once a week a steamer arrives from Cardi- 
gan and Bristol. Sailing-boats, rowing-boats, 
fishing-boats, and even a small yacht may be 
hired for a sail round Pen Cribach and the Allt 
Goch cliffs. For bathing there are the Dyffryn 

360 



THE CARDIGAN COAST NORTHWARDS 351 

sands and the beach at Cribach Bay, and one 
or two little coves, when the tide is available. 

The porth has on one side the narrow neck 
which ends at Fath Gareg, and on the other the 
bold headland rising from Cribach Bay and the 
cliffs of Cribach and Allt Goch to a height of 
five hundred feet or so. There are caves like Dol- 
wen to be reached by boat or by scrambling, on 
both sides of Aberporth, and fishing in the har- 
bour produces whiting, rock-codling, plaice &c, 
while further out when the mackerel come, there 
is every chance of making a fair haul any 
morning. The name Ogof (Welsh, a " cave " ) 
seems to be used here sometimes for the sharp 
indented creeks which abound on this coast, as 
well as for a cave proper with roof and the rest 
complete. 

Traethsaith, another of the newer seaside places 
of this Cardigan coast, stretches up a green cwm 
from the opening and sheltered hollow at the 
mouth of the Bern. The older cottages, hidden 
in the cwm and within a brief walk of the sea, 
form at one point such a rural hamlet as one 
might expect to find deep in the country. The 
sands below at the aber of the Bern are very 
good, with a gradual descent and a beach for 
bathing. Northwards the stretch of sands on 
toward Penbryn is one of the finest this coast 
can offer you anywhere. When the tide serves 
the beach along the sands from Traethsaith and 
past the next rocky corner affords a long ram- 
bling-ground. It can be extended too at will by 
taking to the cliffs beyond the Penbryn cwm, and 
exploring Llangranog and, still further away, 
Ynys Lochtyn. 

Penbryn, a little more than a mile north of 



352 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Traethsaith, has a nice old church, St. Michael's, 
perfectly suiting its position by the sea ; and a 
pleasant sea-glen or cwm on the Hoffnant. In 
connection with this cwm and the Llanborth 
beach below lingering tales of the smugglers who 
landed their run-goods here, and hid them in the 
glen, are told. Llanborth, if this be the same as 
Llongborth, is famous in Arthurian tradition ? 

' ' In Llongborth, I saw the battle 
And biers beyond number, 
And men blood-stained from Geraint's sword. 

In Llongborth, I saw the spurs 

Of horsemen who did not flinch from the spears ; 

And the wine-drinking from the bright glass. 

In Llongborth, I saw the weapons 
Of men, and blood fast dropping." 

In Llongborth, adds the poet, " I saw Arthur,' 
and in Llongborth " was Geraint slain." 

The glen or cwm of Nant Llanborth above is 
worth diving into. The cliffs near Penbryn and 
between that and Llangranog are traversed by a 
footpath skirting their brinks with occasional 
diversions. The sea links, as we discovered, pro- 
duce (what is not common in seaside pastures) 
plentiful mushrooms. Traces of an old camp are 
to be seen about half a mile from Traeth, back on 
the high ground of Cnwc y Rhaglyn ; and there is 
an old stone (which Sir John Rhys has recorded) 
about a mile south, the other side of the Penbryn 
hollow, in a corner of a field above the road near 
the descent to Dyffryn Bern. At Llanborth Mill, 
where we once ate blackberry tart and crumpogs, 
the traditions of the neighbourhood may be dis- 




Photo by-] 



\W.R. Hall, Aberystwyth. 
DANIEL Rowlands, LLANGEITHO. 



To face p. 352. 



THE CARDIGAN COAST NORTHWARDS 353 

cussed. Castell-Prudd and Castell-y-Dolig and the 
Gaer may be invaded afterwards, on the road to 
Blaenporth from Penbryn. 

Llangranog is another village tucked away in a 
cwm, with just enough space at its outlet for a 
beach between the steep cliffs that enclose it. 
Above, the houses lie snug and sheltered, so that 
the bracing Cardigan air is not too trying for 
delicate folk. The easiest way to the village is to 
ride or drive from Newcastle Emlyn. If bicycling, 
beware of the last hill and zigzag to the head of 
the village from the high moorlands beyond New 
Inn. A lodging for a night — or longer — can be 
had down at the lower end of the village, where a 
couple of inns and some ugly seaside houses are scat- 
tered among the original cottages of the hamlet. 

Readers of the Welsh novels and romances of 
" Allen Raine " will find no great trouble in adjus- 
ting some of the scenes of Torn Sails, A Welsh 
Witch, etc., to the surroundings of Llangranog 
and the coast ranging south to Traethsaith past 
Penbryn Church. 

Ascending past some old limekilns on the north 
side of the beach, a steep cliff path leads to a tidal 
gap and across the table rocks and seaweedy pools 
which divide Ynys Lochtyn from the line of the 
coast. The top of Ynys Lochtyn is grassy, a 
tempting retreat ; but there is only an hour or two 
at low water in which the island can be explored. 
One or two fine caves on the east side have 
changed, it is said, within the last twenty years, 
owing to the falling of the rock ; but the rock 
still makes stubborn fight against the sea and its 
inroads. Lochtyn is not a place-name of Welsh 
origin, but akin to the Irish lough and Scottish 
loch. The " men of Lochtyn," says an old local 

23 * 



354 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

gossip, " are the Norsemen ; Llochtyn with the II" 
but is he not thinking of the "men of Lochlyn"? 

Dinas Lochtyn, whose side we skirted on the way 
to the island, is an old camp, possibly a fastness 
used by pirates on this coast ? A climb to the top 
of it will show how good a sea-rover's camp and 
watch-out point it was. On the other southern 
side of Llangranog, and near the field-path to 
Llanborth, are some vanishing old walls on the 
site, easily traced, known as Castell Bach ; and 
nearer the sea a trenched and embanked camp, 
so different in kind both to the Castell and the 
camp Dinas Lochtyn that it suggests well the slow 
succession of the strongholds of far different races 
built on this coast in ages and periods widely 
apart. 

Every other resident at New Quay is said to be 
a retired sea-captain ; hence the number of houses 
appears to provide for a much larger crowd than 
can find quarters. There is a sad story of an im- 
provident old gentleman in a white top-hat who 
had to sit on his portmanteau all night on the pier 
— every available bed in the place being occupied. 
The new Cardigan light railway, if it comes, will 
make a great difference to the New Quay people. 
The town stands well posted in the curve of New 
Quay Bay, three successive white steps of terraces 
rising between the pier and the " Head." Past their 
lower end runs New Quay High Street on its way 
to the pier and harbour. When the Bristol steamer 
and other craft come in the scene there recalls the 
good days of this miniature sea-port sixty years 
ago. At the pier end a lighthouse gives the 
passing vessels, and those that in storm try to 
make New Quay harbour by night, a better chance 
than in the days when the cottage candles were 



i 




THE CARDIGAN COAST NORTHWARDS 355 

the only beacons. Standing on Tower Hill you get 
a fair view of the curve from the Head on to Lla- 
nina. The sands vary in places, and change after 
heavy tides, exposing new patches of pebble or 
shingle. Whiting, pollack, codlings, and other 
sea-fish abound here. A good morning's fishing 
will often bring in more than the hungriest family 
can eat ; and if you are boating you can row out 
past the Head and round Careg Walltog to the 
Birds' Rock, which later summer visitors do not 
see at its best. If you are storm-bound ashore, you 
can go north to Llanllwchhaiarn Church, or south 
to Llanina Church. An old raid of the " Black 
Pagans " on this cove accounts possibly for the 
dedication of the latter church to Ina, King of the 
West Saxons. But some say the church was 
originally Llan liar. The small building is not, 
however, very interesting. But to wander from 
Llanina up the Gido stream to Civm Gido and the 
old house at Wern, half an hour's walk or more, 
offers a welcome exchange for the glare of the 
sands on a July day. Now a farmstead, Wern is 
a house of character and tradition. In 1485 the 
master of Wern was one Einon ap Daffydd Llwyd ; 
and when Harry, Earl of Richmond, marched 
through South Wales from Milford, he is said to 
have slept at this house, and in the room which is 
to be seen, with the very bed he slept in. 

Some two miles and a half S.S.W. of New Quay 
and you reach the scattered village of Llandysilio- 
go-go — which is well worth a long afternoon. 
The name comes from St. Tysilio and (possibly) 
"gogofau "= caves, as suggested by "Non" (Miss 
Gwladys Evans) in her prize-essay on the place- 
names of the district. It is one of the few remain- 
ing parishes in Wales, she says, " uncorrupted by 



356 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

English customs and speech " ; and she quotes the 
late Stephen Evans, J.P., who said that if Welsh 
should ever come to die, it would last be heard in 
" one of the dingles of Llandysilio-go-go," when 
some poor old woman would ejaculate with her 
dying gasp — " Ach y fi!" Of the two or three 
historical houses in the parish, the most famous 
was that where Henry VII. was feasted on his 
march northward to fight for the crown at Bos- 
worth, and which gives a name to " Cwmtydur " — 
Tydur's cwm or dingle — Tydur, after Tudor, it is 
suggested. The remains of this house are not now 
to be seen. It stood about half a mile from Traeth 
Cwmtydur, up the cwm. The little stream that 
passes through the dingle to the sea is " the Dewi," 
which flows down from Ffynnon-ddewi (David's 
spring), which is situate some five miles away, 
near Wervilbrook, and to be found between the 
fourteenth and fifteenth milestones on the right 
side of the road from Cardigan to Aberaeron. The 
story is that St. David was on his way from St. 
David's or Ty-ddewi in Pembrokeshire to Hen- 
fynyw near Aberaeron, and fell athirst at this 
point, and there asking a blessing on the dry 
crust he took from his wallet, was rewarded by 
the springing forth of this spring at his feet. 
\ Aberaeron still wears something of its old 
sailor-like air when the boat comes in from 
Bristol ; and when the coach arrives from Lam- 
peter of an evening, the town is like one in the 
other-world of Dickens. Then the scene on the 
quay or in the street is heartening to witness 
to those who feel sentimental about the old order 
of the road. The town occupies what was once 
the delta of the Aeron, when the river had two 
outlets. The Vale of Aeron, whose charms have 



THE CARDIGAN COAST NORTHWARDS 357 

been often sung, well and ill, brings in the 
highway from the east at a breakneck descent. 
x Once travelling across from Llanwrda, G. R. and 
I bicycled to Lampeter, where we were brought up 
by heavy rain. There we visited the College 
Library (it was not term-time and the place 
seemed deserted) and loitered over the rare 
ballads and rarer tomes. Towards seven in 
the evening we saw our rain-beaten inn-windows 
suffused with a sudden pale lemon-coloured sunset 
light, which filled the line of sky over the roofs 
and chimneys opposite. The rain had gone. Tired 
of being cooped up, we decided there and then 
to take the road for it, and press on with all 
speed to Aberaeron. A last flying shower caught 
us on the bleak hill near Rhyd-y-Gof (Smith's 
Ford), and as it passed it seemed to drag part of 
the daylight away with it. At Llanfihangel the 
evening had declared itself, and a cold gusty 
wind began to blow against us from the sea. 
We rode fast, however, down the Vale of Aeron 
and did not need to light up till we reached 
Llanerch. Unluckily, three miles further on, a 
rougher gust of wind blew out one lamp, and on 
opening the other at a convenient lull, a second 
gust blew out that too. Riding on without lights, 
thereupon we found ourselves presently benighted 
at Hen Geraint in the darkest stretch of road, I 
believe, that is in Cardiganshire. It was a com- 
pletely strange road to us too, and as it seemed 
to accelerate its gradient we did not dare to ride 
and had to grope our way nervously at a snail's 
pace, till at length we sighted a light — the first 
lamps of Aberaeron. It was one of those adven- 
tures that bring back the sensation of the un- 
known road and the pitchy night that counted 



358 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

for much in the old road-faring tales. We tried 
to remember Geraint's plight, but now to quicken 
our apprehension there came the smell and the 
sound of the sea, blown up through the darkness, 
which conjured up Sir Bors instead. One night 
Bors left his quarters in just such a sea- vale and 
" at a broken wall rode out" and reached the sea 
itself, and took ship. And " the ship departed 
into the sea, and went so fast that him-seemed 
the ship went flying ; and it was so dark that 
he might know no man." But we did not really 
discover the sea till next day. When at last we 
came to a halt fairly in the midst of Aberaeron, 
with a few lighted windows blinking at us, we 
felt like people who had stepped into reality from 
a dream. We found the place — inns and lodging- 
houses — crowded with holiday visitors, and had 
extreme trouble in getting quarters anywhere. 
We had to be content then with a very small 
bedroom, and for breakfast next morning we 
had bacon so rusty that it seemed to infect the 
whole neighbourhood. We were glad to change 
quarters as the day wore on. 

We were surprised next day to find so urban 
a savour about Alban Square. For the town, 
despite its old-fashioned air, can only claim about 
a century's flourish. Its pier was built in 1807, 
and its good days came soon after. From the 
perch at the end of the pier you can see a wide 
circuit of distant mountains northward — Plinlim- 
mon, Cader Idris, a glimpse of Snowdon, and the 
curve of Cardigan Bay. You can take boat there 
for a brief voyage to New Quay Head and the 
Bird Rock, or a change of transit can be had 
by taking the "Aberaeron express," which has 
the effect of a rescue by line and cradle from 



THE CARDIGAN COAST NORTHWARDS 359 

a wreck without the terrors. The sensation is 
more complete if it is full tide. Over the harbour 
you find Trinity Church, a new one comparatively, 
with a tall tower. The old parish church lies 
half an hour's walk away at Hen Fynyw ; for 
the town stands in two parishes. 

Aberaeron has a racing-track (in Alban Square) 
where wheelman race every August, and a chaly- 
beate spring. The well is free to all comers ; and 
runs no risk of being converted into a fashionable 
spa. Dr. Burghardt, of Manchester, in an epistle 
to the Aberaeronians, says of this water : — 

" The Chalybeate Spring is certainly one of the 
best in the kingdom, it is a carbonate of the 
protoxide of iron, dissolved in a very pure icater. 
The common chalybeate springs are sulphate of 
the protoxide of iron dissolved in water much 
charged with sulphates of calcium and magne- 
sium and salt, hence the iron in the common 
chalybeate springs is not nearly so easily assimi- 
lated by the system as the iron in the carbonate 
or true chalybeate waters. Chemically speaking 
the iron in the sulphate springs is not so easily 
torn away from the sulphuric acid with which 
it is combined, consequently the action in the 
human system is much slower, and less efficient. 
With carbonate springs this is not the case, as 
carbonate of iron is one of the most easily decom- 
posed iron salts. Your Chalybeate is a mild one, 
which I think makes it more pleasant for most 
people." 

Talsarn Mountain, the backbone of mid-Cardi- 
gan, and its eastern outliers above Cwrtmawr and 
Llangeitho do their best to keep the Aeron from 
finding any outlet at all. For some miles they 
seem to be succeeding, but at the point where 



360 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

the Gwenffrwd joins the Aeron, its course is 
already south-west, and in five or six miles more 
it has reached between Talsarn and Llanlea, its 
southern limit, and turned northward, which 
course it maintains with such deviation as hill- 
streams have to the sea. 

On leaving Aberaeron to explore the vale, you 
follow the Lampeter road, over the upper bridge, 
through Hengeraint Woods, diverge to pass 
Llanerch-Aeron Church and Llanaeron, below 
which a rapid stream joins the Aeron. Here is 
one of the pleasantest loitering-places in the 
vale. Tri-Crug- Aeron, or Trichrug, another triple- 
cairned height, is the southern end of Talsarn 
Mountain, that rises there to over a thousand 
feet. Walking from the top of Trichrug east- 
wards, and down to Talsarn, a Cardigan poet 
once wrote a song some lines of which still bear 
quoting : — 

Sweet Aeron's vale, unknown in song, 

Demands the warbling lyre : 
Shall silver Aeron glide along, 

And not a bard inspire ? 
What bard that Aeron sees can fail 
To sing the charms of Aeron vale ? 

There golden treasures swell the plains, 
And herds and flocks are there ; 

And there the god of plenty reigns 
Triumphant all the year ; 

The nymphs are gay, the swains are hale : 

Such blessings dwell in Aeron's vale." 

The spectacle seen from Trichrug is well worth 
a climb, and may easily be had by taking the 
cross-road over the river at Newbridge, or Pont 
Newydd up to Cilcennen. This road passes along 




Photo by] 



MONK'S CAVE, CARDIGAN COAST. 



To face p. 360. 



THE CARDIGAN COAST NORTHWARDS 361 

the western side of the hill, after leaving Ty 
Mawr, and half an hour's climb brings one to 
the cairns and remains of old burial-grounds. 

From Newbridge, about four miles from the 
starting-point, you have another league to go to 
Ystrad, where the church is worth a halt, if only 
to see the square pillars that divide its single 
aisle and the tombs to the Lisburnes and others. 
Mr. J. M. Howell, an Aberaeron authority, reminds 
us of the great family of Dyffryn Aeron, the 
Lloyds or " Llwydiaid," memories of whose tenure 
for hundreds of years are scattered all along the 
vale. Two of the most famous mediaeval Davids 
wrote poems to their descendants, man and maid. 
Ieuan, one of the family, was himself a poet in 
the time of Owain Glyndwr, whose praise he sang. 
It was his father who built Pare Rhydderch in 
the thirteenth century; and the house of Pare 
Rhydderch, as it now exists, is, even in a country 
of old houses, " marvellous antiquate." Thence 
comes one of the oldest MSS. of the Mabinogion, 
the " Llyf r Pare Rhydderch." A son of the famous 
old Sir Rhys ap Thomas married a daughter of 
the Lloyds, and the Prices of Gogerddan come 
of the same stock. But ancient houses come to 
an end ; and the last heiress of the race, Miss 
Lloyd of Cilbwn (a seat not far from the older 
seat of the family at Cilpwll, Pare Rhydderch), 
was murdered by her serving-man in 1792 — mean 
extinction of a noble tree ! However, as a matter 
of fact, many offshoots still do exist in the vale. 

Llangeitho lies about one mile north-east of 
Cilpwll, which is at the lower end of the wooded 
glen of Gwenffrwd, where traces of the mediaeval 
forest-lands seem to linger. 

The more direct road from Llanlear to Llan- 



362 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

geitho is that via Talsarn, when Cilpwll hamlet 
and the house of Pare Rhydderch are both passed 
in turn. Pare Rhydderch is one of those old 
houses in which the soul of a neighbourhood is 
laid away. With Llangeitho is associated one 
of the most fervent lights the Welsh Church ever 
lit — so fervent, indeed, that the authorities grew 
afraid of it, and tried to put it out ! The light 
was Daniel Rowlands, Curate of Llangeitho for 
some years ; his bishop, deeming him a firebrand, 
bade him desist, so Rowlands lost a parish and 
gained a country. His statue stands by the 
chapel ; his grave is in the churchyard, but 
where no one seems to know. Another fifty 
years, and the Church of Wales will make late 
amends perhaps to her too inspired curate. 
Neither the parish church nor the great chapel 
of the village to-day are those in which Rowlands 
officiated ; but both occupy the old sites. The 
fine plate in Meyrick's Cardiganshire, showing 
the curious carved oak-screen, leaves one with 
some natural regret for the old church. Row- 
lands' statue, though crudely designed and disap- 
pointing, is said to be a good likeness. He died 
in 1790. It is worth note that for some time 
before his deprivation by the bishop, Rowlands 
served Nant Cwnlle, Llangeitho, and Llanddewi 
Brefi Churches — i.e., all three were in his charge 
as sole incumbent — for a salary of £10 a year. 
In spite of all, Rowlands continued his attachment 
to the church, and if he had had his will would 
never have separated from it. 



CHAPTER XXXIV 

ABERYSTWYTH — THE THREE TOWNS — AN ATLAN- 
TIC STORM — THE COLLEGE — THE NATIONAL 
LIBRARY — IEUAN THE TALL — DEVIL'S BRIDGE 

There are really three Aberystwyths, not one : the 
old Cardiganshire borough and market town, the 
thronged watering-place of July, August and 
September, and the 'Varsity town of the other 
months. To most people it is the second of the 
three that counts ; recalling, when they think of 
it, the sun-heated broad curve of esplanade, saved 
by the most delicious sea-breeze ever cooled over 
salt-water. And the sea outlook across Cardigan 
Bay and the old site of the drowned " Hundred," 
towards Snowdon, the Eifl peaks, or Cyrn Du, is 
like a vision of Cymru Fynyddig, the true moun- 
tainous Wales, while the air, sea-borne or mountain- 
borne, is of a kindred savour. 

One February, after an influenza, a wise doctor 
ordered us to Aberystwyth. We were hardly able 
to walk when we arrived, and my fellow-traveller's 
face from illness, weariness, and train-e?ini« was 
forlorn as Mariana's. What ill fate had sent us 
from home, we wondered, to languish and contract 
pneumonia in a seaside lodging, where the damp 
walls would surely have salt-sand in the mortar? 



364 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

But bright sea-coal fires (to call them so because 
the name has a savour) when we arrived, and 
bright suns for three days, changed our tempera- 
ture. On the third day we climbed a hill ; on the 
fourth a telegram came asking for a promised 
article on an old play, and it was written and 
posted on the sixth. On the seventh we went (in a 
snowstorm and bitter weather) to Strata Florida ; 
and on the eighth returned home in obstreperous 
health. If there seems an element of extravagance 
in this, it is entirely due to the Aberystwyth air. 

The winter pleasures of the town are those that 
somehow or other come first to mind in the retro- 
spect. The kind of salt-water you may have to 
taste can be gathered from the accompanying 
print of the Esplanade during the superb storm 
of December, 1910 : the finest, by all accounts, and 
the most destructive, known on this exposure of 
the coast within living memory ; threatening 
enough almost to recall the deluge that sent 
Cantref-y-Gwaelod, the Bottom Hundred, under 
the sea. The storm began with a stiff SSW. 
breeze, which grew into a seventy-mile an hour 
gale. With this, and a poor ebb before it, the tide 
was at its usual height three hours before time. 
A little later, and it had begun to handle the great 
concrete blocks of the pavement and the coping of 
the sea-wall like so much brickwork. These huge 
missiles were thrown across the road and against 
the railings of the houses, as in some oceanic 
ecstasy and mad bombardment. Basement 
windows were smashed, areas filled with gravel, 
and doors battered in. The shingle lay in some 
places two and three feet deep afterwards on the 
Promenade. 

" The Hostel and the houses adjoining bore the 



ABERYSTWYTH 365 

brunt of the storm and suffered most damage. 
Immense waves struck the sea-wall a little below 
Victoria House School and ran along the face to a 
point where the wall makes a bend slightly north- 
ward, when the waves were thrown up to an 
immense height and tons of water fell on to the 
pavement on the sea side and rushed in rolling 
waves to the houses opposite, battering down the 
railings, smashing in doors and windows, and 
entering the basements. Sometimes a long line of 
water, hundreds of feet long, rose in the air after 
impact with the sea-wall. At other times an 
isolated mass of water rose and was broken up by 
the wind in blinding spray which completely hid 
the Hostel and adjoining houses from view. Be- 
tween eight and nine o'clock, when the tide was at 
its height, a tremendous sea struck the high electric 
lamps and three were knocked out, leaving the end 
of the Terrace in darkness. The lamp near the 
Queen's Hotel was also extinguished ; but the one 
opposite the ' Plynlymon ' weathered the storm and 
gave a brilliant light until the current was turned 
off at midnight." 

One envies those inhabitants who were not 
actually enswamped the chance of seeing this rare 
spectacle. 

The sea made a bold attempt to take a degree in 
the College too, which is already a building with an 
eventful history. It has had losses ; been burnt 
with fire and gutted ; been made into a monster 
hotel at huge cost ; then sold for a mere song to 
become a beacon of the Welsh Renaissance. 

" The Cambrian Tourist and Post-chaise Com- 
panion" (5th ed., 1821) speaks of the original 
structure as " a fantastic house in the Castellated 
form " consisting of " three octagon towers with a 



366 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

balcony towards the sea." The writer adds that 
the fragments of the Castle are from hence viewed 
to great advantage : a statement which helps to 
suggest that in the new transmutation of Wales 
the citadel has been changed from a material to an 
intellectual fortress. 

Long ago Owen Glyndwr had among his recon- 
structive schemes that of a university : companion 
idea to that of a Welsh Parliament which we shall 
yet, I daresay, see realised too ? What would he 
have said if, when he was investing Aberystwyth 
Castle, he had foreseen how as its walls crumbled 
the other Castell Ddysg whose vision he had 
nursed was to wax and become a thing accom- 
plished and a Welsh landmark ? 

It has fostered many men who have achieved — 
Celtic scholars, lyric poets, and patriots like the 
late T. E. Ellis, M.P. 

The latest Castle of Aberystwyth is the National 
Library, whose site stands fair on the hill above 
the town. Years ago, I remember being sadly 
troubled to get Elizabethan books at short notice 
for an unexpected piece of work. If Professor 
C. H. Herford had not happened to be living there, 
and if he had not hospitably let me ransack his 
shelves, I should have had to go back to London. 
Now the bookman will have his citadel. For 
its provenance one of the greatest bookhunters 
Wales has had, Sir John Williams the physician, 
has been collecting manuscripts, folios, rarities, 
especially Celtic ones, and spending a fortune in 
the search. And others have worked as tirelessly 
in their own fields, men like Mr. J. H. Davies of 
Cwrtmawr, born bookhunters, if such a thing is 
conceivable. If Sir John and his fellow-con- 
spirators have for half a century been collecting 



ABERYSTWYTH 367 

and buying books and libraries, it is in order to 
endow this National Library as it deserves. Before 
the end Aberystwyth will have one of the richest 
libraries of Cymric and Celtic books and MSS. in 
the world. This year — 1911 — will see the foun- 
dation-stone laid. Research in such a library 
should, because of the ozone forced by the west 
wind through the windows and between the 
shelves, be accomplished with twice the ordinary 
dispatch. 

Among the treasures here are the Hengwrt and 
Peniarth MSS. collected by Robert Vaughan, of 
Hengwrt (who died in 1666), the friend of John 
Selden and Archbishop Usher. Finally they passed 
to Mr. W. R. M. Wynne, of Peniarth, who, being 
without a direct heir, sold them to Sir John 
Williams on condition that they should go in the 
end to the National Library, if established at 
Aberystwyth. Mr. Wynne died in January, 1909, 
and so the MSS. have become its property. They 
include the oldest manuscripts of the old Welsh 
Laws, the oldest of the Mabinogion, the oldest 
of the Holy Grail romance, and a vast number of 
medieeval poems. "The Black Book of Carmar- 
then," however, is the prime of this splendid 
antiquity. Its vellum leaves contain the earliest 
script we have of the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries ; and they open with the duologue be- 
tween Merlin and Taliesin on the battle of 
Arderydd. 

Dr. Gwenogvryn Evans, who has tabled and 
catalogued these priceless things, and who knows 
more about Welsh MSS. than any man living, says 
it is not merely the largest, but the finest, library 
of the kind that exists or can exist, " thanks to the 
prescience and skill " of Robert Vaughan " in 



368 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

bringing together the noblest monuments of 
Kymric history and literature." Vaughan is only 
one of many who have worked in silence to pre- 
pare for the building up at length of this Celtic 
library. 

The librarian, Mr. John Ballinger, shows too in 
his account what the contemporary vigilance of 
such a library has to be, if it is to fulfil its office 
of the perfect record of a nation and its people. 
Newspapers, broadsides, Eisteddfod-ana, local pam- 
phlets, religious documents, and all kinds of 
ephemerides have to be gathered up and put into 
organic shape and sequence. Everything that is a 
record has to be kept. " Local ballads, for instance, 
often deal with events of which there is no other 
record. One such case occurred recently. A sheep- 
dog on the Plynlymon range took to sheep- 
killing, and wrought great havoc, but defied all 
efforts to track and destroy it. Ultimately Sir 
Edward Webley-Parry-Pryse, of Gogerddan, took 
out his hounds and ran it down, and it was killed, 
to the great relief of the farmers. A local poet 
narrated the event in rhyme, which was printed on 
a broadside. The circulation was entirely local. 
Yet there is an element of romance in the story 
sufficient to furnish forth a modern novel." All 
these fugitive pieces have to be captured on the 
wing and put into safe-keeping here. A collection 
that ranges from one of the finest Chaucer MSS. 
to the latest ballad is like to become a goal of 
studious and librarious pilgrims from all the 
world over as time goes on. 

" One division in the National Library is called 
the Department of Documents, a section in which 
it is hoped to make a collection of things mainly 
for future use. By way of illustration of what is 



ABERYSTWYTH 369 

intended, the Thomason Collection of Civil War 
Tracts may be cited. These ephemeral publi- 
cations of a troubled time are individually of 
restricted interest, but arranged chronologically 
as they are in the valuable catalogue issued a 
couple of years ago by the British Museum, they 
form a record, as Carlyle said, * Worth all the 
sheepskins.' If carefully collected over a long 
series of years, and arranged under subjects, or 
topographically, whichever may be best for each 
item, the flotsam and jetsam of to-day will be the 
gold-dust of the future." * 

One thinks of the unlucky scholar-vagabond, 
Ieuan Brydydd Hir — Evan the Long (or Tall) Poet — 
in watching the rise of this great library endowed 
with some of the very MSS. he spent his days in 
getting. He was a Cardiganshire man ; author of 
that early anthology, " Specimens of the Ancient 
Welsh Poetry" (1764), which helped to give the 
poet Gray ideas for his Welsh subjects. Born 
under a troubled star, Evan the Long was fortu- 
nate in going to school at Ystrad Meurig under a 
master like Edward Richard, a true pastoral poet 
by grace and nature. He showed on leaving school 
what a disinterested soul was his by making over 
his Cardigan patrimony to a younger brother, in 
order to go to Oxford. There he found other lore 
than there is in books, and learnt the easier grace 
of wine. He left without a degree; and then he 
became a vagrom curate, of doubtful habits, never 
holding any charge long, and continually collecting 
and continually losing books. We might have 
surprised him any day on the road in Cardigan- 

* "The National Library of Wales" (by Mr. John Bal- 
linger), Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society, 
February, 1911. 

24 



370 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 



shire carrying a bundle of them wrapt in a check 
handkerchief. 

He spent some time at Aberystwyth ; and even 
when he was not there himself kept a room going 
in which to house his precious books and MSS. 
In a letter to a correspondent, unnamed, he 
writes : — 

" I have a large collection of books at Aber 
Ystwyth, and a room for which I pay three pounds 
a year. My collection of MSS. likewise is there, 
and I am afraid must be in a great measure spoiled 
by dampness and want of fire in the room." 

He also speaks of having spent two guineas in 
advertising for pupils in order to start a school in 
the town, and makes it plain that his " present 
distressful situation " of a curate without a cure 
was in danger of growing chronic. 

One verse of his might almost be written up in 
the entrance hall of the National Library. In 
Welsh it runs — 






O bydd Hon hinon dydd ha', — neu wybren 
Yn obrudd y gana', 
Y cyfaill goreu, cofia, 
A lleufer dyn, yw Uyfr da," 






which might be reset in English after this manner, 
roughly to preserve the " Englyn " : — 

" O if the summer day be fair, — or the bleak 
Wind of winter blind the air, — 
Of all friends for a man, far or near, 
A good book is the best, sans compare." 

Poor, high-fortuned Ieuan ! As you walk up the 
street to the market, when the last tourist has 



ABERYSTWYTH 371 

gone from the town, you shall see him turn the 
corner, three rusty quartos under his arm. 

Another figure to be conjured up here is the 
author of " Twm Shon Catti," who wrote also " The 
Land beneath the Sea" — Cantref-y-Gwaelod — and 
" The New Aberystwyth Guide " of 1824, published 
by Lewis Jones in the town. The charm of this 
" New Guide " lies in its power to conjure up the 
old days before the railway came. J. Llewelyn 
Prichard, the author, has had his account in the 
Swansea chapter,* but in his role of guide he 
reminds us of the Devil's Bridge and of the way 
there, and of " The Grand and Tremendous Fall of 
the Rheidol " (in Black Letter impressiveness) as 
they were in the days of the open road. The Devil 
still roars under the two bridges as of old, but he 
is in a cage now, and you pay sixpence to look 
at him. Instead of walking there, too, you can go 
by the new Devil's Bridge line, which is as adven- 
turous as any in South Wales. The present 
itinerant had the pleasure of riding over it before 
it was opened and while it was still in the rough ; 
and the train seemed to climb hills and impend 
over waterfalls and pull up in farmyards, with 
delightful indifference to all the laws of gravity 
and traction. A fine wild region is that it brings 
you to, with Havod where Thomas Johnes set up 
his mansion and his press and printed his Froissart 
and other great books, and Ystrad Flur or Strata 
Florida— where some say Dafydd ab Gwilym is 
buried— and Pont Erwyd, Llyn Iwan, Llyn Rheidol 
and Plynlymon — all within reach if you are a good 
walker. Much nearer home, you pass Nanteos, 
where lived Swinburne's friend, George E. J. 
Powell, co-author with Arnason of the " Icelandic 
* Pp. 161-175. 



372 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

Legends," 1864. One only wishes he had turned 
his fancy to Welsh things too, for he had a rare 
gift of narrative and more than a translator's share 
of originality.* 

* See article, "A Tribute to Swinburne," in the Nine- 
teenth Century, June, 1909. 



CHAPTER XXXV 

LLANBADARN — CANTREF-Y-GWAELOD — THE SECOND 
DELUGE — BORTH — THE END OF THE JOURNEY 

In some of the older Cardiganshire records 
Aberystwyth, the town as well as the Castle, 
appears as Llanbadarn Fawr, in whose parish it 
stands. Leland speaks of it in one page of his 
Welsh Itinerary as " Abreostuthe." His entry reads 
as if he had tried to transcribe in part the actual 
words that some Cardigan farmer he had met had 
used in speaking of it. The town, he notes, " hath 
bene waullyd, and hathe great privilegis, and is 
bettar market than Cardigan." 

There, at Llanbadarn, stands a noble church, 
heavy-wall'd, deep-arch'd, built to outlast time ; 
a place where the shadow shot with light of the 
greatest poet of Wales ought to be surprised if 
anywhere ; where the memory of Dafydd ab 
Gwilym certainly is held close beneath the sombre 
arches. There is one of his odes, or " cywyddau," in 
particular that starts his Llanbadarn memory. It 
is the harp-ode in which he begs the tide not to 
prevent his getting over the river Dovey (" na 
luddia ei hynt tros Ddyfi i ymweled a Morf udd ") 
to see Morvyth — hasting to go — 

"I dew lwynbedw i Lanbadarn " 

(In the thick birch-covert to Llanbadarn). 
373 



374 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

In another he speaks of her pilgrimage across 
many abers and rivers to receive absolution at 
St. David's for having slain him by her cruelty : — 

Deep the waves of Dovey are, 
And mountain high, to hinder her : 
Rheidol too, for Morvyth's feet, 
Peace ! make strait the wat'ry street ; 
And Ystwyth, leave thy spumy rage 
And grant with heaving breasts a stage 
To her that steps on pilgrimage." 

' ' A dwfn y w tonnau Dyfi 
Dwfr rhyn yn ei herbyn hi ; 
Rheidol, gad, er d'anrhydedd 
Heol i fun hael o fedd ; 
Ystwyth, ym mhwyth, gad im hon 
Drais dew-ddyfr, dros dy ddwyfron." 

The coast journey that Dafydd had then to 
make, on his way from Anglesey and round to 
Llanbadarn, and on to Glamorgan, was, because 
of the rivers he had to cross, a pretty devious one. 
He had plenty of time, as he waited for a ferry at 
Aberdovey, or for the tide to ebb on the Rheidol, 
to string some of those melodiously linked, fluid 
couplets which are among the wonders of the art 
of rhymed verse. 

Before leaving Llanbadarn you can, if you have 
the art, call up a far older church than that you see 
there now, and with it the form of an older Genius 
of Place than our other David of the Odes — St. 
Padarn, or Paternus. Gerald just speaks of him 
in the Baldwin Itinerary ; and helps us to use him 
as another link that connects the old tribal clerics 
with the Arthurian tales. Padarn went to Ireland, 
and brought back possibly some Irish ideas with 
him. His cousin Samson had Arthur's faculty of 





iE I 



LLANBADARN TO BORTH 375 

making stones fly like thistledown, if the story told 
of the Celtic Crosses in the churchyard is true. 
Samson was threshing with them on Pen-y-Dinas, 
when the head flew off one ; flew indeed so far 
that it dropt right into the churchyard here. 
Whereupon Samson, with a very explicit Arthurian 
oath, threw the shaft after it. The stones are 
there now : " they may be seen," which proves how 
dependable tradition is. Moreover, one of them at 
least bears the name of an Irish chief; and as 
Padarn had been to Ireland in quest of his father, 
the reality of the story is established. That fantasy 
came after is but natural ; it does not destroy the 
matter of fact. 

Gerald's account of the Breton knight who went 
to Llanbadarn, and of the cleric with the spear he 
saw there, is too striking to be left out of the 
reckoning. Even so, he ends with a naive admis- 
sion that he knows more than he thinks it politic 
to tell:— 

"It happened that in the reign of King Stephen, who 
succeeded Henry I., a knight, born in Armorica, having 
travelled through many parts of the world to see different 
cities and the manners of the inhabitants, came by chance 
to Lhanpadarn. On a certain feast-day, whilst both the 
clergy and people were waiting for the arrival of the abbot 
to celebrate Mass, he perceived a body of young men, armed, 
according to the custom of their country, approaching 
towards the church ; and on inquiring which of them was 
the abbot, they pointed out to him a man walking foremost, 
with a long spear in his hand. 

"Gazing on him with amazement, he asked, 'If the abbot 
had not another habit, or a different staff, from that which 
he now carried before him ? ' 

1 ' On their answering ' No I ' he replied, ' I have seen 
indeed and heard this day a wonderful novelty 1 ' and from 
that hour he returned home, and finished his labours and 
researches. 



376 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

"This wicked people boasts, that a certain bishop* of 
their church (for it formerly was a cathedral) was murdered 
by their predecessors ; and on this account, chiefly, they 
ground their claims of right and possession. No public 
complaint having been made against their conduct, we have 
thought it more prudent to pass over, for the present, the 
enormities of this wicked race with dissimulation, than 
exasperate them by a further relation." 

At Llanbadarn lies buried one of the most 
original men Wales has produced — Lewis Morris 
o Fon, poet, inimitable letter - writer, mining 
engineer, botanist, philologist, marine surveyor, 
and many things besides. The collection of the 
Letters of Lewis Morris and his brothers, issued 
in a subscribers' edition by Mr. J. H. Davies, is full 
of colour, Welsh mother-wit, and shrewd and 
caustic comment on the Wales of the eighteenth 
century. 

Going northwards, there is still a long string of 
explorable places to be added to the Aberystwyth 
count. By taking train to Glandovey you are in 
reach of the Llyfnant Valley, and Cwm Einion 
(called by guide-books " the Artists' Valley," which 
has more character than that fond name seems to 
declare). We once took up quarters at Cwm Farm, 
and learnt by heart another valley which shall be 
nameless here — 

"... Lest inquisitive tourist 
Hunt it, and make it a lion, and get it at last into guide- 
books." 

From that centre we explored the Borth district, 

* The name of this bishop is said to have been Idnerth 
— the same personage whose death is commemorated in an 
inscription at Llanddewi Brefl. 



LLANBADARN TO BORTH 377 

went to Bedd Taliesin, and counted the blue space 
about it, worth many a league's travel ; but found 
nothing, high or low, more affecting than the 
unconquered bog of Cors Fochno and the sand- 
levels of Traeth Maelgwn. 

The folk-lore and traditions of this district would 
need a Jacob Grimm for their account. With 
regard to Taliesin, you cannot do better than 
look up his story as added (in a corrupted ver- 
sion) to the Mabinogion proper. A note reminds 
us that the Cistvaen at Bedd Taliesin was opened 
in 1848 by the Cambrian Archaeologues, but nothing 
was found in it save darker earth. As for Cors 
Fochno, it has a Toad of untold age, by whose 
side the Salmon of Llyn Llyw was a mere babe 
in antiquity. On Traeth Maelgwn, tradition says, 
the over-lordship of Wales used to be decided. 
A sign was required to decide the supreme regality 
of the lord-elect on Traeth Maelgwn, and the 
test was the old one of the wave-controller. 
Maelgwn succeeded in floating on a chair with 
waxen wing's and keeping his place when the 
tide flowed, while the other claimants to the title 
of Superman gave way and fled. Those who have 
watched the force of the tide, even as squandered 
in that wide estuary of the Dovey when it flows 
up, a mile wide, fast and irresistible, will know 
what to think of Maelgwn's magic. There is a 
story, not over well authenticated, of a dispute 
between Taliesin and Maelgwn which ought to 
be true, since it shows the poet and king at war 
and the poef victorious. In this account Maelgwn 
takes Taliesin's land from him, and he curses the 
king. It is because of the curse that the " Vad 
Velen," or Yellow Plague, overtakes Maelgwn at 
last. He hides from it in the church in Rhos, 



378 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

but spies through the keyhole and sees the Evil 
Thing in visible presence and in a form not unlike 
that of a speckled Toad, and so dies. In those days 
the curses of the bards were often mortal. 

But Taliesin was daemonic in all his properties. 
His mysterious advent on this coast is the epic 
result of a cataclysm of nature, which is described 
in the old story of the Drowning of the Bottom 
Hundred — or Cantref-y-Gwaelod — monarch of all 
tales of the all-conquering sea and the conquered 
land. Gwyddno Garanhir was king of the drowned 
region, and one feast-night Seithenen (called ever 
afterwards) the Drunkard, his sea-ward, was in 
his cups and did not watch the sea. The flood 
broke in and drowned the Cantref and sixteen 
great fortified cities, the finest in all Wales, 
with it- 
Cardigan Bay occupies the spot where the fertile 
plains of the Cantref had been the habitation and 
support of a flourishing population. Such as 
escaped the inundation fled to Ardudwy, and the 
country of Arvon, and the mountains of Eryri 
(Snowdon), and other places not previously in- 
habited. "By none was this misfortune more 
severely felt than by Gwyddno Garanhir, to 
whom the reverse of circumstances it occasioned 
was so great that, from being an opulent monarch, 
he was all at once reduced to the necessity of 
maintaining himself and his only son, the un- 
fortunate Elphin, by the produce of the fishing 
weir mentioned in the text. 

" This disastrous event is commemorated in a 
proverb still repeated in the Principality : — 

"'The sigh of Gwyddno Garanhir 

When the wave rolled over his land.' 



LLANBADARN TO BORTH 379 

" There is also preserved in the Myvyrian Archai- 
ology (I. 165) a short poem upon the subject 
attributed to Gwyddno Garanhir, in which there 
are some exceedingly poetic and striking passages. 
The bereft monarch calls upon the author of his 
distress to view the calamitous effects of his in- 
temperance, pronounces maledictions upon his 
head, and describes the outcry of the perishing 
inhabitants of that unhappy region." 

. ' ' Stand forth Seithenin and behold the dwelling of heroes 
— the plain of Gwyddno the ocean covers ! * 

Accursed be the sea guard, who after his carousal let 
loose the destroying fountain of the raging deep. 

Accursed be the watcher, who after his drunken revelry, 
loosed the fountain of the desolating sea. 

A cry from the sea arises above the ramparts ; t even to 
heaven does it ascend, — after the fierce excess comes the 
long cessation ! 

A cry from the sea ascends above the ramparts ; even to 
heaven does the supplication come ! — after the excess there 
ensues restraint ! 

A cry from the sea awakens me this night I — 

A cry from the sea arises above the winds! 

A cry from the sea impels me from my place of rest this 
night ! 

After excess comes the far-extending death." 

As a consequence of this great loss, Gwyddno is 

* Seithenyn the Drunkard's mischance in letting the sea 
overflow the Cantrev-y-Gwaelod is related in Triad xli. 

t Traces of three ancient stone embankments are said to be 
still visible in the district where this inundation took place. 
They are called Sarn Cynvelyn, Sarn-y-Bwlch, and Sam 
Padrig. "The latter is particularly conspicuous, being left 
dry at low water to the extent of about nine miles, and the 
sailors of the neighbouring ports describe its whole length to 
be twenty-one miles, beginning near Harlech, and running in 
a south-west direction" (Cambro-Bi-itun, i. 302). 



380 THE SOUTH WALES COAST 

from a king reduced to a fisherman ; and it is in 
his weir at Borth that the babe Taliesin is found 
by Elphin. But you must turn for the full story to 
the Mabinogion volume or to Peacock's imagina- 
tive burlesque, " The Misfortunes of Elphin." 

Once, crossing with our bicycles by ferry from 
Aberdovey, G. and I found the tide far out, and 
the sands between the river and Borth hard and 
smooth for riding. There was a fair nor'-west 
wind blowing, and the sensation as we rode south 
before it was more like flying than anything we 
had known. Borth itself, we thought, had a de- 
cided effect of being a growth of the sand-dunes 
and the sea. We had tea in an old sea-captain's 
cottage with sand at its door and white stones 
in its garden, protected by wooden bulwarks from 
the too friendly sea ; and white ducks with sandy 
bills came and quacked at the door. I wondered, 
on hearing of the last great December storm, 
how this half-amphibious abode of man stood the 
watery siege? Its force may be gathered from 
the account given of the same sea-fury at 
Aberystwyth. 

At the river Dovey the Welsh South Coast-line 
ends. " Approaching the river Devi," says Gerald, 
" that divides North and South Wales, the Bishop 
of St. David's and Rhys son of Gruffydd, who with 
a courtesy peculiarly gracious in so great a prince 
had travelled with us all the way from Cardigan 
Castle, returned home." One can still see that part- 
ing on the long sands of Borth — another of the many 
episodes that have occurred there on their shift- 
ing beach. If Borth were ever in these pageant- 
making days to re-enact its history on those sands, 
the leave-taking of the young prince and the 
bishop on one side, and the comely self-conscious 



LLANBADARN TO BORTH 381 

Gerald and Archbishop Baldwin on the other, 
would make a notable piece of spectacle. 

These superb old wayfarers have faded, we may- 
think, too completely from our possible range of 
recollection to be held credibly actual to-day. But 
do ever the eidola of the people who have lived 
and fared, or fought and died on such sea-shores 
or in the fields, quite perish out of mind? They 
are dead to you if you have not the imagination 
to overstep time. They are alive at this moment if 
you choose so to quicken them. It is with some 
faith in the power of the reader to see this ancient 
tenantry of the sea-coast and its hamlets, farms 
and old houses, as in a glass, that he has been 
led this long dance from Gwent to the ferry over 
the Dovey. If he do not, or do not care to, see 
them, then the coast journey has failed of half 
its purpose, which is to bring many far-distant 
places and their folk into an erratic chronicle : 
another contribution to the incomplete testament 
of Wales — the Wales of the great itinerants, from 
Gerald to Dafydd, from John Leland to George 
Borrow, from Taylor the Water Poet to Twm o'r 
Nant, last of the Interlude-writers. 



INDEX 



Abebaeron, 356-361 

Abergavenny, 61 

Aberpergwm, 152 

Aberporth, 350 

Abersili, 86 

Abertawe, 162, 183 

Aberthaw, 97 

Aberystwyfcb, 363-372 

Adam, Abbot, 151 

Adrian IV., Pope, 108 

Aeron, 356-361 

Agricola, 49 

" Allen Raine," 353 

AUt Goch, 350, 351 

Amman, 207, 210, 211 

Amrotb, 253 

Angle, 293 

Aquitania, 49 

Arberth, 252 

Ardudwy, 378 

Arnulf de Montgomery, 279 

Arthur, King, 43, 46, 52, 53, 72, 153 

Arthur's Stone, 194, 195 

Artist's Valley, the (Cwm Einion), 

376 
Arvon, 378 
Asaph, 172 
Augusel (Angus), 50 
Aulus Didius, 65 

Bacon Hole, 192, 193 

Bala, 52 

Baldwin, Archbishop, 142, 268, 

374, 375, 380, 381 
Ballinger, Mr. J., 6, 368, 369 
Bardsey, 92 

Baring-Gould, Rev. S., 36, 312 
Barlow, Bishop, 309 
Barri, Gerald de, 70 
Barry Dock, 89, 90 
Barry Island, 89-93 
Bassaleg, 41 



383 



Bayonne, 63 

Beaufort, Duke of, 163 

Beaumains, Sir, 47 

Beaumont, Harry, 212 

Beaupre, 118 

Beavan, Madam Bridget, 250 

Bedd Taliesin, 377 

Begelly, 253 

Beili, 77 

Benson's Cave, 178 

Benton Castle, 274 

Benwick, 63 

Bere, Sir John de la, 202 

Berkrols, Sir Roger, 76 

Bird, Dr. Geo., 217 

Birkrolles, Sir Jasper, 98 

Bishopston, 186, 192 

Blackmore, R. D. (the novelist), 

128 
Blodeu-wedd, 155 
Bohun, de, 30 
Borth, 373, 380, 381 
Borrow, George, 381 
Bosco's Den, 195 
Bosherton, 286 
Bowen's Parlour, 195 
Bran, 117 
Brandy Cove, 192 
Braos, William de, 165, 184 
Breaksea Point, 113 
Breakspear, Nicholas, 108 
Brean Down, 63, 83 
Bridgend, 81, 121, 124 
Bridgewater Bay, 84 
Bristol, 83 

Britolio, Roger de, 16 
Broughton Bay, 206 
Bulmore, 48, 51 
Burnes, Miss, 243, 244 
Bute, Marquess of, 69 
Butler, Sir Arnold, 117 
Burry Holms, 200, 201 



384 



INDEX 



Burry Inlet, 202, 206, 207 
Burry Port, 217 

Cadburt, 52 

Oadell, 224 

Cadoc, 50 

Cador, 50 

Cadoxton, 89 

Cadwgan of Bleddyn, 279 

Caerleon, 29, 45 

Caer Sidi, 180 

Caerwent, 25, 28, 29 

Caesar, 49, Caesaria, 47, 50 

Caldecot, 24, 29, 30 

Caldy Island, 265, 266, 278 

Camelot, 52 

Oandleston, 125 

Cantref-y-Gwaelod, 364, 371, 377- 

380 
Canvey Island, 54 
Capel Als, 216 
Capel Dewi, 209 
Garacalla, 49 
Caractaous, 117 
Caradoo ap Iestyn, 148, 202 
Cardiff, 63-72 
Cardiff Castle, 65-70 
Cardigan, 341-349 
Cardigan Bay, 363 
Carew Castle, 270-274, 276 
Carmarthen, 224, 226, 228-240 
Carne, Jane, 117 
Oarne, Thos., 109, 121 
Cam Engli, 339 
Cam Llidi, 313 
Carreg Cennen, 210 
Castell Coch, 71 
Castell Glas, 55 
Castell Prudd, 353 
Castell-y-Dolig, 353 
Castle Martin, 293 
Caswell Bay, 192 
Cefn Mabley, 60 
Cefn Sidan, 212, 218, 220 
Cefn-y-Bryn, 194, 200 
Ceibwr Bay, 347 
Ceredig, 117 
Charles I., 00, 61 



Chepstow, 13-21 

Christchurch Hill, 62 

Churchyard, 55 

Cilbwn, 361 

Cilcennen, 360 

Cilgerran, 344-346 

Cilhepste Falls, 156, 157 

Cil Ivor, 203 

Cilpwll, 361 

Clares, The, 19, 134 

Clare, Sir Richard de, 71 

Cleddau, 273 

Clegyr Poia, 313 

Clyn Ystyn, 207 

Cobb, Mr., 269, 278 

Cockletown, 221 

Coed yr Odyn, 94 

Coity, 121 

Coldknap Point, 53. 93 

Col Hugh, 106 

Colyn Dolphyn, 111, 112, 116 

Conan, 142 

Conybeare, Dean, 86 

Cornelius Castus, 47 

Cors Fochno, 377 

Cowbridge, 76, 118-120 

Cox, David, 85 

Craig-y-Dinas, 52, 152 

Cribach Bay, 351 

Crick, 28 

Cromwell, Oliver, 19, 247, 259 

Crymmych Arms, 341 

Cunotamus, 346 

Cwm Einion, 376 

Cwm Plysgog, 344 

Cwm Porth, 157, 158 

Cwrt Bryn y Beirdd, 209 

Cwrt-y-Camau, 209 

Cyrn Du, 363 

Cywyn, River, 242 

Daoia, 49 

Dafydd ab Gwilym, 40-44, 371, 

373, 374, 381 
Darva, Lake, 56 
Davies, Mr. J. H. Cwrtmawr, 366, 

376 
Davies, Rev. Edward, 193 



INDEX 



385 



Davies, Eev. J. D., 200, 201 

Davis, Matthew, 166 

Deffett-Francis, 170 

Denys, 74, 78 

Devil's Bridge, 371 

Derw, Derwen, 145 

Derw Pawr, 242 

Dinadan, 47 

Dinas Head, 336 

Dinas Lochtyn, 353, 354 

Dinas Powis, 74, 77 

Dolwen Pt., 249 

Donovan, 52, 136 

Dovey, Eiver, 373, 381 

Draba Aizoides, 189 

Duffryn, 78 

Dunraven, 97, 112, 114, 115-118 

Dwynwen, 166 

Dyvrig, 50 

Dynevor (Family), 150 

East Gower Coast, 183-191 

East Orchard, 118 

Ebwy, 55 

Edward II., 148, 168 

Eglwys Cymmin, 248 

Eifl Peaks, 363 

Einon, 119 

Elarch, 56 

"Elfed,"214 

Eli, 84 

Ellis, T. E., MP., 366 

Elphin, 379, 380 

Enid, 62, 120 

Eryri, 378 

Essex, Earl of, 285 

Esterlinge, Sir William le, 76 

Estrighoil, 15 

Evans, Dr. Gwenogvryn, 367 

Evans, Stephen, J.P., 356 

Ewenny, 76, 121 

Ewer, Col., 19 

Penton, 216, 258 
Ferrar, Bishop, 233, 309 
Perryside, 219-237 
Fferyll (Virgil), 189 
Fishguard, 331-336 



Fitzhamon, Robert, 65, 73, 94, 

107, 148 
Fitzosborn, William, 16 
Flatholme, J., 63, 84, 87, 92 
Plemingston, 118 
Florence of Worcester, 26 
Fonmon, 77, 118 
Fontygarry, 96, 97 
Freeman, E. A., 54, 57, 58, 60, 102 
Frost, John, 39, 42 

Gaul, 49 

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 48, 49, 67 

Geralnt, Sir, 61 

Gerald the Welshman, 48, 142, 

143, 149, 267, 268, 279, 337, 

375, 376, 380, 381 
Geta, 49 

Glamorgan, 64-96 
Glamorgan, Vale of, 73-81 
Glandovey, 376 
Glora, 57 

Gloucester, William Earl of, 70 
Glyn Neath Station, 151, 152 
Gogerddan, 361, 368 
Golden Mile, 119 
Goodwick, 331 
Goodrich, 15 

Gower, Bishop, 165, 166, 285, 307 
Gower Coast, 183-205 
Granville, Richard de, 148 
Granvilles, The, 147 
Grassholm, 316, 319 
Grey (the poet), 369 
Gray, Thomas, 131 
Great Gutter, 113 
Green Bridge, 249 
Green Castle, 55, 241 
Griffith ab Ivor, 71 
Griffith ap Rhys, 224, 225 
Griffith, Knight of the North, 

37, 38 
Griffith, Rev. J., 60 
Gruff ydd ab Llewelyn, 28 
Gruffyd ab Rhytherch, 26 
Gull Rock, 181 
Gwbert, 347 
Gwendraeth, 218, 219 



25 



386 



INDEX 



Gwenevere, 50, 64 
Gwenffrwd, 3GO 
Gwent, 24, 59, 60 
Gwern-y-Cleppa, 41 
Gwyddno Garanhir, 378, 379 
Gwynllewg Levol, 48 
Gwynllyw, 37, 38 
Gynin, River, 242 

Hamilton, Lady, 226 
Hamilton, Sir William, 298 
Harlech, 879 
Haverfordwest, 302 
Hen Geraint Woods, 357 
Henry II., 35, 246 
Henry VII., 105 
Henry of Knighton, 147 
Hepste, 156, 157 
Herberde, Edward, 282 
Herbert, Sir George, 197 
Herford, Prof. O.H., 366 
Hirwain, 157, 166 
Hoby, Family, 149 
Hogarth, 39 
Howell, J. M., 361 
Hoyle's Mouth, 259, 263 
Hubberston, 299 
Huntsman's Leap, 291 

Jenkins, Sir Leoline, 118 

Jones, Dr. John, 257 

Jones, Rev. Griffith, 250, 251 

Jones, Col. Philip, 166 

John, King, 184 

Johnes, Thomas ; Havod, 371 

Johnstown, 241 

Julia Ivorna, 47 

Julius Frontinus, 16 

Julius the Martyr, 49 

Kean, Edmund, 226 
Kemeys, Sir Nich., 19, 60 
Kemeys-Tynte, Col., 60 
Kenfig, 129-139 
Keynsham Abbey, 57 
Kidwelly, 170, 217, 218. 224 
Kilgetty, 253 
Kingsley, Chas., 181 



Knight, Rev. Hey, 127 
Knight, John, 71, 90, 91 
Knighton, Henry of, 147 

Laleb, 148 

Lampeter, 357 

Lamphey Palace, 284 

Landore, 162 

Landor, Walter Savage, 161, 172, 

173, 174, 264 
Lanrhymney, 57, 59 
Laques, 225 
Laugharne, 244-248 
Launcelot, Sir, 47, 64 
Lavernook, 84, 85, 86, 89 
Laws, Edward, 260, 312, 380 
Lee, Vernon, 56 
Leland, John, 34, 202, 219, 279, 

281 
Ler, 56 

Lewis Morganwg, 150 
Linney Head, 292 
Llanaeron, 360 
Llanbad, 55 
Llanbadarn, 373-376 
Llanblethian, 118 
Llanboidy, 245 
Llanborth, 354 
Llanoaut, 15 
Llancarvan, 77 
Llanddewi, 195 
Llanddewi Brefi, 362, 376 
Llandefeilog, 221 
Llandeilo Abercowyn, 242 
Llandeilo Bertholey, 58 
Llandeilo Verwalt, 193 
Llandysilio-go-go, 355, 356 
Llanolly, 214-217 
Llanerch, 357 
Llanfair, 24 

Llanfihangel Abercowyn, 242 
Llanfihangol (Card.), 357 
Llangattock, 50 
Llangeitho, 361, 362 
Llangennydd, 200 
Llangorse Lake, 134 
Llangraunog, 351-354 
Llangunnor, 236, 239 



INDEX 



387 



Llangyndeyrn, 224 

Llanina, 354 

Llanllwch, 241 

Llanmadoc, 200, 201 

Llanmorlais, 203 

Llanrhidian, 203 

Llanrian, 329 

Llanstephan, 219-227 

Llantarnam, 54 

Llantwit Major, 92, 100 

Llantrisant, 148, 181 

Llanwnda, 331 

Llanybri, 225 

Llewelyn ab Iorweth, 148, 165 

Lleyn, 349 

Lloyd, Miss (of Cilbwn), 361 

Lloyds, the (Laques),225,226 

Lloyds, the (Pare Bhyddoroh), 361 

Llychwr, 203, 206-213 

Llyfnant Valloy, 376 

Llyn I wan, 371 

Llyn Rheidol, 371 

Llyn Safaddan, 134 

Llyn-y-Fan-Fach, 207 

Llyn-y-Fan-Fawr, 162 

Llywarch ab Llewelyn, 165 

Lochtyn, 353 

Lockyer, Sir Norman, 330 

Londres, Maurico de, 120, 124 

Londres, Wm. dc, 117 

Longbury Bank Cave, 259, 263 

Lot, King, 46 

Lucius, 46 

Lud, 14 

Lydgate, 52 

Lydney, 14 

Lydstop, Point and Caves, 2 

Mabel, Fitzhamon, 35, 50 
Mach Ynys, 216 
Madawc, 14 
Maelgwn, 377 
Maonhir, 202 
Maesaleg, 41, 42 
Mallt-y-Nos, 111 
Malory, Sir Thomas, 63 
Manawyddan, 144 
Manorbier, 267, 270 



Mansels, 140, 142, 196 
Map, Walter, 67 
Marcross, 81 
Margam, 140, 146 
Marisco, William do, 176-178 
Mark, King, 47 
Marloes, 299 

Martin, Henry, 13, 18, 19 
Mat, Iron Hand, 116 
Matchless Orinda, tho, 344 
Mathern, 24, 32 
Mathews, Hobson, 91 
Mathry, 829 
Maud de Haia, 170 
Mellte, 151 
Merlin, 46, 232 
Merrick, Rice, 64, 71, 73, 94 
Mersea Island, 54 
Merthyr Mawr, 125 
Meryon, 85 
Mondalgyf, 55 
Meyriok, 362 
Milford, 273, 276, 297 
Milford Haven, 297 
Michaelston, 54 
Minchin Hole, 194 
Moel Trigarn, 341 
Monkham Pill, 277 
Monknasb, 113 
Monkton Priory, 281 
Mordrod, 64 
Morfudd, 42, 373 
Morgan, 57, 60, 124, 145 
Morgan ap Caradog, 149 
Morgan le Fay, 74, 184, 195 
Morgan Gam, 148 
Morgan, Sir Philip, 61 
Morganwg, 63-146 
Morganwg, Iolo, 133 
Morris, Lewis, 284, 376 
Morva Bycban, 249 
Mowbrays, De, 166 
Moyne's Court, 24 
Mumbles, the, 175, 185 

N angle, 276 
Nant Cwnllo, 362 
Nanteos, 371 



388 



INDEX 



Narberth, 252 
Nash, 109 
Nash Point, 112 
Neath, 147-160 
Nedern, 26 
Nesta, 267, 280 
Nevern, 338 
Newbridge, 360 
Newcastle Emlyn, 353 
Newgale Bridge, 302 
Newport, 33-44, 58 
Newport, 337 
Newquay, 354 
Newton Nottage, 125-129 
Normandy, William of, 39 
Nose, the ; Pembrey, 211 
Nott, General, 232 

Odnant, 105 

Offa's Dyke, 20 

Ogmore, 117, 124, 125 

Ogney, 101, 102, 105 

Ogwr, 121, 122 

Oldbury, 31 

Orthez, 59 

Ostorius, 65 

Owain Glyndwr, 361, 366 

Owain Gwynedd, 232 

Owain Lawgoch, 154 

Owen, George, 295, 298, 317 

Oxwich Castle, 196 

Oystermouth, 183, 184 

Paris, Matthew, 176 
Park Mill, 188, 190 
Paviland, 168 

Peacock, Thomas Lovo, 379 
Pembrey, 212 
Pembroke, 276 
Pembroke Oastle, 276-281 
Pembroke Dook, 284 
Pembroke, Earls of, 166, 246 
Penarth, 63, 66, 82, 85 
Ponbryn, 351 
Penclawdd, 204 
Pen Dar, 145 
Pendino, 248, 249 
Penlline, 118, 119 



Penmaen, 194 

Penmark, 118 

Pennard, 186, 193 

Penrhyn Castle Bay, 347 

Penrice, 199 

Pensarn, 232 

Pen-y-Dinas, 375 

Percival, Percy, 6, 300, 301 

Perddyn, 159 

Pergrin, 348 

Perrot, Sir John, 246, 271, 283 

Peterstone, 55, 56 

Phaer, Dr., 345, 346 

Picton Castle, 273 

Picton, General, 107 

Plinlimmon, 358, 368, 371 

Pont Neath Vaughan, 150, 152 

Pontvaen, 336 

Popham, Attorney Gen., 247 

Poppit, the, 347 

Port Eynon, 196 

Port Skewett, 26 

Port Talbot, 185, 209 

Porthcawl, 127, 128, 185 

Porth Clais, 311, 316 

Porthkerry, 63, 93, 94 

Porth Lisky, 311 

Porth Melgaw, 312 

Porth-yr-Ogof, 158 

Poyer, Col., 252,281 

Precelly Mountain, 277, 339 

Pritchard, John, 141 

Pritchard, T. J. Llewelyn, 170 

371 
Pwllcrochan, 277 
Pwll Meyrick, 24 

Quantocks, the, 84 

Ramsey Island, 311, 316 
Rat Island, 180 
Red Roses, 251 
Rees, Rev. David, 216 
Rees, Roger, 275 
Reynoldstone, 200 
Rheidol, 271 
Rhianon, 56, 252 
Rhoose, 94, 97 



INDEX 



389 



Rhos, 377 

Ehosilly, 200 

Rhyd-y-Gors, 241 

Rhymney, 54, 56 

Rhys, 119 

Rhys ap Griffith, 165, 233, 345, 

380 
Rhys ap Tewdur, 280 
Rhys ap Thomas, Sir, 235, 271 
Rhys Ieuanc, 202, 212 
Rhys, Sir John, 180, 265, 271, 345, 

352 
Risca, 54 
Ritec, 263 

Robert, Duke, 65, 66, 67 
Robert, Earl of Gloucester, 67 
Roche Castle, 302 
Rogut, 38 

Rowlands, Daniel, 362 
Rupe, Adam de, 302 
Ruperra, 60, 61 
Russell, Lord John, 40 

St. Aaron, 50 

St. Augustine, 84 

St. Baruch's, 92 

St. Briavel, 15 

St. Bride's, 55 

St. Bride's Bay, 310 

St. Bride's Major, 125 

St. Caernhoc, 57 

St. Clear's, 243 

St. Cringat, 250 

St. David's, 276-286 

St. Donat's, 107, 111, 112, 118 

St. Elli, 214, 216 

St. Fagan's, 77 

St. Fronto, 36 

St. Gildas, 265 

St. Govan's, 287, 308 

St. Gwynllyw, 33 

St. Illtyd, 123 

St. Ishmael, 219, 223 

St. Julian's, 45 

St. Keri, 63, 95 

St. Kynemark, 20 

St. Maelog, 222 

St. Mellon's, 57, 58 



St. Padarn, 374 

St. Pierre, 25 

St. Quintin, 118 

St. Tecla's, 21 

St. Teilo, 193 

St. Tysilio, 355 

St. Woollos's, 35, 37, 38, 58 

Sampson, 101, 103, 265, 374 

Samuel, 101 

Sarn Padrig, 374 

Sater, 50 

Saundersfoot, 253 

Scwd Einion Gam, 159 

Scwd Gwladys, 159 

Sedbury, 31 

Seife, 57 

Seithenen, 379 

Severn, Sea of, 23, 54 

Severn Tunnel, 27 

Severus, 46 

Shutter Rock, 179 

Sili, Nant, 87 

Sirhowy, 59 

Sker Rock, 127 

Skomar Island, 300 

Slebech, 273 

Sloane, Sir Hans, 167 

Smith, Blethyn, 32 

Solva, 304-305 

Somerset, 63 

Sore, Sir Peter le, 42 

Southall, Mr., 59 

Southerndown, 115, 116 

Spencer, de, 35 

Spurrell, Mr. Walter, J.P., 6, 

344 
Stackpool, 293 
Stack Rocks, 254, 276, 222 
Steele, Betty, 232 
Steele, Lady, 238 
Steele, Sir Richard, 236 
Steepholme, 72 
Storrie, John, 93 
Stow Hill, 35 
Stradlings, the, 107 
Stradling, Sir Harry, 112 
Strata Florida, 364, 371 
trath Towy, 231 



390 



INDEX 



Strongbow, Richard, 16 
Strongbow, Gilbert, 345 
Sudbrooke Camp, 31 
Sully, 77 
Swanbridge, 86 
Swansea, 161-174 
Swansea Bay, 161 
Sweyn, 105, 162 
Sychnant, 154 

Tacitus, 48 

Taf, 219, 244 

Ta2, 54, 64, 65, 72 

Talbots, 140 

Taliesin, 377, 378 

Talsarn Mountain, 359 

Taylor, Jeremy, 19 

Taylor, " Water Poet," 233, 240 

Teivy, 344, 348 

Tenby, 254-266 

Tennyson, 51 

Tewdrio, 5, 24 

Thaw, 118 

Thomas, T. H., 6, 83, 318, 347 

Thompson, Pyke, 84 

Tintern Abbey, 20-22 

Tostig, 26. 

Towy, 218, 225, 223, 244 

Towyn Point, 218 

Towyn Warren, 347 

Traeth Maelgwn, 377 

Traethsaith, 351 

Tredegar, Lord, 42 

Tresilian, 106 

Trevaen, 330 

Trevelyan, Marie, Miss, 79 

Trichrug, 360 

Tristan, 184 

Troggy, 26 

Trwyn-y-witoh, 115 

Turbervilles, 120, 121 

Turberville, Pain, 76, 117, 124 

Turborville, Sir Simon de, 123 

Tusker Rock, 113, 115, 127 

Twm o'r Nant, 381 

Twm Shon Catti, 170, 371 

Twrch Trwyth, 207, 210 

Twt Hill, 15 



Tydur, 356 
Tylwyth Teg, 188 
Tyrwhit, 108 

Uphill Bay, 63 

Upton, 274 

Urien, 50 

Usher, Archbishop, 108 

Usk, 24, 25, 33, 35, 37, 45, 54 

Vale of Alun, 313 
Vaughan, Henry, 344 
Vaughan, Robert, 367 
Vaughan, Sir Richard, 115 
Vespasian, 48 

Warley Point, 220 

Warren, 293 

Watoyn Wyn, 214 

Waterwynch Bay, 262 

Watkin, John, 198 

Wentloog, 38, 48, 54, 56 

Wentwood, 24, 25, 30 

Wenvoe, 77 

Weobley, 201 

West Orchard, 118 

Whitesand Bay, 311 

Whiteford Barrows, 202 

Whiteford Lighthouse, 200 

Whitland, 251, 287 

Whitmore Bay, 93 

Williams, Penry, 85 

Williams, Sir John, 326, 366 

Windsor, Gerald de, 267, 272, 279, 

280 
Woolpack, 299 
Worm's Head, 195 
Wye, 13 

Wyndham, Humphrey, 117 
Wynne, Mr. W. R. M., 366 

Yellow Top, 196 

Ynys Lochtyn, 351, 353 

Ynys Pyr, 265 

Ystrad Iwl, 14 

Ystradfellte, 152 

Ystrad Meurig, 369 

Ystrad Tywi (Strath Towy), 231 



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